We are all aware of just how fast technology changes and becomes increasingly a facet of every sector of life. We all struggle with both trying to “catch up” and “keep up” through having to constantly upgrade our skills, software, and hardware and to amend our ways of working. Indeed, everyone working in education today must do so. It is mandated and required to renew our teaching license, it is urged and applauded by our administrators, and it is demanded by our students and their parents.
The very definition of an educated person is changing. Computing is now required of all high school graduates in 2001 in North Carolina. Eighth graders are already being tested on basic computing skills. The tool skills of speaking, reading, writing, mathematical computation, and image-making, while important in and of themselves, must now be utilized through of computers.
Don Tapscott, in Growing Up Digital, states, “The digital medium is increasingly a reflection of our world; every view, every discipline, every commercial interest, every repository of knowledge. Because its use is distributed, interactive, malleable, and lacking central control, it is a revolutionary change in every discipline, attitude, and social structure.” (p. 13) Indeed, it is difficult for us all to comprehend and cope with the accelerated rate of changes or how all of this will ultimately change us both in the ways that we work and in the ways that we will communicate. Tapscott believes it is already changing the values and thought patterns of the “Net Generation,” which he designates as the children between the ages of 2 and 22 in the year 2000. This is today’s school population; these are the students we work with in art.
Margot Lovejoy's Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 2nd edition, explores more specifically how the arts are using all forms of electronic media for creative expression. Artists have always been attracted to new materials and new ways of doing things. Electronic media and digital imaging is the area currently receiving the greatest attention and controversy.
In just the past few years, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, a portion of the Internet, this change seems to be driving ever more quickly computing as a part of education and everyday life for all. It is a quick and ready resource for research and entrance into an immediate “digital library” as well as a mode of communication. The World Wide Web, a portion of the Internet, is barely six years old and think how quickly we have come to accept and use the web in our everyday lives! Many forms of publication are moving to digital formats with increasingly more and more materials accessible online or in CD-ROM.
This course will give us time to explore and assess just what is available for us as support, as content, and as communication resource for our teaching in areas of studio, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. This course will give us an opportunity to ponder just how art has embraced technology (all “know-how”) both as tool or medium and subject matter of the works of art themselves. Art is both wonderful and strange in that it embraces both the newest, most cutting-edge technology of any period of time, bending that technology to aesthetic purposes, as well as preserving and continuing the tradition of the most antique technologies. It is neither contradictory nor odd for weaving, pottery, metal smithing, sculpture, painting, and drawing along with photography, welding, and digital imaging to be thought of as all necessary activities today in an art curriculum.
As technology makes it easier to do a task, the onus is that a higher standard of performance becomes mandated as usual performance for all. This is also true of quantity as well as presentation quality and content. As production becomes easier, the amount of time allotted for that production begin to shrink. But working with computers is fast/slow experience. While some things are very quick to accomplish, the computer as a tool as often demands slow crafting of the imagical and textual creative work we do.
This course will give us an opportunity to explore the concepts of intellectual property and what rights, constraints, and concerns about that domain we as teachers must now know in terms of copyright, fair use, licensing, and ethical concerns as we work with students. Older deeper issues of copying, appropriation, quotation, replication, and ownership as it applies to images, to art, and to study can be revisited and assessed for ourselves, for our professional educational environments, and for our students. The fact that we can easily self-publish via the Internet makes it urgently important that we have a firm grasp of these issues.
Finally, as teachers, in a time where we must demonstrate through performance-based products our knowledge and skill, not only must we know how to effectively use digital and electronic technology, but we must also prove it through documentation. I have included on the course Web-site the materials and guides that are currently being used with UNCG Art Education Majors for the creation of their Advanced Technology Portfolios. If you are required to submit a similar document for your school district to demonstrate your mastery of these skills, please discuss this with me. You are free to use or adapt any of these materials to your needs. I will be glad to help you with this documentation process.
I am looking forward to our time together online this summer. I am anticipating that this will be a wonderful adventure for us all.
Roberta Rice, Spring 2001