Constructed Photographs

This marvelous video offers an historic timeline of the constructed photograph. Beautifully crafted, by Matt Glass.

Virtual Worlds - latest project

I've been working a great deal on virtual worlds in art education. I've created an Ed Media Center in Second Life to support our program. It's got a gallery, classroom, and access to all kinds of media.

My website - http://juliansea.wordpress.com/

This very well done video is by Tony O'Driscoll. (Wada Tripp on Second Life)

Technology

Social Media

Daniel Pink talks about motivation. Fascinating and persuasive.

Telephony!

Lately it's been phones everywhere I look.  Part of this may be my own passionate desire for an iPhone, but it seems that the topic of phones in the classroom has become increasingly vital and relevant. 

Also, increasingly heated.  There's are concerns being raised about the distraction, about cheating, and about bullying. These are issues that we need to address.  This video by David Truss makes some excellent points:

The POD's are Coming

View more presentations from David Truss.

At any rate. - on to the links!

The Mobile Learner is a blog devoted entirely to the discussion of the uses of mobile technologies in the classroom! It seems to be updated regularly. I put it on my bloglines.  http://themobilelearner.wordpress.com/

This entry at The Clever Sheep blog looks at both sides of the cellphone debate, and provides lots of links to commentary.  

http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/04/cell-phones-in-classroom.html

Liz Kolb has made this something of a specialty of hers. This website for the K12 Online Conference has a page with plenty of resources, and a video of her very informative presentation.

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=152

This entry on the Teaching Palette, is fantastic! The thirty best new iPhone aps for art teachers - hurrah! 

 http://theteachingpalette.com/index.php?s=mobile

Self Broadcasting links

http://cgar.umwblogs.org/

http://mashable.com/2007/06/27/video-toolbox/

http://www.masher.com/

This is an AMAZING program

It's not Art-ed related, but it does relate to tagging, as it operates off the principles of meta-ing. Try it, it's incredible.

http://en.akinator.com/

Tagging, Museum and otherwise

"The teaching implications of tagging are enormous. If we allow our students to begin assigning their own significance to the evidence we introduce them to, I think we'll find that they make meaning from this evidence in ways that we couldn't imagine. Of course, this means allowing them to make their own meaning from the past, something that many members of our conservative and fussy tribe will recoil from. But just as many, will see it as a marvelous chance to find out what our students can do with the evidence we give them."

http://edwired.org/archives/2006/03/subverting_the.html

Article on museum tagging - http://researchforward.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/tagging-museum-collections/

Brooklyn museum's Posse tagging game - http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/posse/

Museum ed blog, article on tagging - http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/two-tagging-projects-that-make-sense.html

Two games that attempt to tag the internet -
Phetch - http://www.peekaboom.org/phetch/
gwap - http://espgame.org/gwap/

Clouds of words

Here's the tag crowd of my philosophy of art education. Pretty, isn't it?

addition aesthetics arts believe changing context creative culture deeply disciplines education employed enrich essential explore express global history human language means nature offers oneself opens opportunity passionately past paves personal places present problem provides safe seems sense society solving students support thinking throughout understand universal unparalleled visually window

created at TagCrowd.com

Wordcloud is a similar program - http://www.wordle.net/

Here's a website with an idea for using word cloud in a lesson plan: http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=103
This entry on the website Teaching with Technology has a bunch of other possible ideas: http://tcoffey.edublogs.org/2008/08/17/wordle-word-clouds/

Free program for making moodboards

This promises to be lots of fun, particularly for design projects. This program enables you to collect images of all kinds, off the internet or uploaded and compile them into moodboards. I can see this being a really valuable tool for teaching visual brainstorming - useful in any kind of commercial art and design projects - interior, fashion, graphic, etc. It will appeal to the preference for appropriation and recontextualizing of material that is pretty distinct in teen students as well.

Watch this space for my own gloriously moody examples!

Image spark - http://www.imgspark.com/

Finding connections

This is an excellent article on finding the best blogs in the subjects one's interested on. And, as luck would have it, the topic happens to be education.  Social Media cheat sheet from Read Write Web.

The best things in life are free

We're all familiar with the gold standard of creative software, Adobe. And it's hard to argue with Photoshop, Illustrator and Dream Weaver. However, if your budget can't accommodate software that costs more than a decent PC, there are options.

There is Gimp, for example. I've been using it for years as a poor man's Photoshop. It allows one to take an image and manipulate it in layers. It's not as refined as the Adobe program, but it's a great way to introduce students to image capture and manipulation for free.

Here is the download page.

There is a program similar to Illustrator, using bezier curves, called Gestalter. I'm not sure it is still available, I am having trouble finding a reliable download..

Apparently the animation program, Blender, is supposed to be excellent. I haven't tried it, but it's free.