Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites

After reading the article Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life by Danah Boyd,  I was able to understand a deeper look into the world of Myspace. As well as looks upon Friendster, Xanga, and Facebook.

Skyler, 18, said to mom, "If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist." These social network sites develop significant cultural resonance among American teens.

I checked out some of the sites launched to attract teens.
Faceparty- a site to meet other teens with similar interests, chat, and gossip specifically in the U.K.
Bebo (Blog early, Blog often)- Users receive a personal profile page where they can post blogs, photos, music, videos, and questionairres to which other users may answer.
Piczo- a photo website builder and community, users can add items such as images, text content, videos, glitters, shout-outs, and profile pages. Took off in the UK

These are all similar sites in which a community is created and teens are lured in by constant entertainment. They can simply log in and "stalk" other users, pictures, and videos they post. 

We were asked in class to expand on the section Network Publics.
Here, public is best defined as "a collection of people who may not all know each other but share 'a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest.'"

Boyd goes deeper into the definition to focus on the 4 properties that fundamentally separate unmediated publics form networked publics:
Persistence: This is the fact that information posted online can be replicated, copied, or reproduced. Enabling communication, but also extending the period of existence of any speech created
Searchability: We may not be able to find one another in a town or state, but by a couple of clicks on a keyboard, a person can be found within seconds. Words or things they may have said can be found just as easily
Replicability: This is similar to Sweeney's article about cloning. Anything in the networks public can be replicated/repeated or copied. It can be made over and over or be used again and again by different individuals
Invisible audiences: This can cover parents, community, administrators, anyone who has access to the internet. It is virtually impossible to know all of those who come across our path online. 

Most of this has been brought up in our education. As students we have been informed of what is okay to post online and what "the public" is capable of finding or seeing us post on social network sites. I don't think this article changed any of my concepts of the networked public. I have had an understanding that what is put online is easily replicated and searched by simply typing a name into Google. One of the things I would look out for as a teacher, would be issues that arrise with children. This is an easy way of students to get a hold of one-anothers information. It is an easy way for bullies to key in on a students pictures/life/history. 
In one of our previous readings, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, an interesting game came up. It was called Medieval Space. In this game students would create a Myspace for a medieval character such as Henry the VI or Queen Elizabeth. As an art teacher I would be extremely interested in having students create a Facebook for artists. They would have to research information on the artist and plug in the information to create a profile for the artist chosen. As a follow up, students would need to friend other artists created and leave messages on the others walls as if they were the artist themselves. 
They can create photo albums of the artists work, profile pictures, "like" pages, etc. Because Facebook and social networking is a popular topic for the youth, this should be a topic they enjoy and are able to relate to.  

Glogster

If you enjoyed one of my previous posts about Wordle, you may enjoy this site!
It is a similar site that allows you to create a form of posters. This site is more for text and images. You can add videos, animated images, text, or graphics to enhance your poster. Here is a little example of something I threw together when testing out this site.



Pretty cool, huh? You can change the background and rotate pictures/text however you'd like. Try it out here!

This would be great for classes in a similar way Wordle could be great. If the student is finished with a product they can create a poster for the subject they were working on in their class project. They can submit it to a class hard drive or a class blog so the teacher can see what the student works on. 

Popplet

Popplet is this nifty little site that allows you to create a visual outline of something. I practiced using it for my Narrative project for Technology in the Art Room. I actually really enjoyed this. I am more of a visual person, so being able to add images to my audio project was helpful for me. I was able to visualize the point I was trying to get across by sound (which I was having a difficult time with, might I add). Let me know what you think when you hear my narrative piece!

But all in all, I enjoyed Popplet. I think it is a great colorful, eye grabbing tool to have. You can sort by color, topic, and incorporate images and videos. Check out mine!

Observations Day 3

Today during observations in the New Paltz Middle School, Taylor and I saw our first "A" day. The big project throughout the day was the sixth grade self portrait collages. Each student needed to create a self portrait incorporating multiple images for a person in the center and words that describe their personality as a border. Throughout the day there were three sixth grade classes, Mrs. Sturgis taught the first class and then allowed Taylor and I to take the reigns for the next two periods.
Jumping into the lesson on the spot was not that hard after watching Mrs. Sturgis do it. The classes respected us greatly and acted as they would if Mrs. Sturgis were teaching.
I found this great trick for the cleanup process for this grade while teaching these two classes. Adding a little competition to their day made for a quick cleanup. When the first table was clear and the students at it were sitting quietly, I deemed them first place! After I announced this to the class, they all quickly picked up their pace and rushed back to their seats with quiet mouths! Worked like a charm. For a 5 minute cleanup, all students were in their chairs after just 3 minutes.

Show and Tell

 

Gulp

 

Gulp: The making of

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. 

This site can be used in art classes for students that are struggling with the use of text and image. If they can plug in multiple words to wordle, a cloud will be created that selects prominent words. Those that stand out to the student can be the words they choose for a project. 

Or as a teacher, this can be a simple day project if a student finishes with an assignment early. They can choose a topic such as the US Constitution, most common crossword answers, or characteristics of a friend. After the cloud is created, adjusted and finalized, they can print or post the final product to a class blog or add it to a class folder.

Fieldwork Day 1: New Paltz Middle School

All I can remember from Middle School art is unmotivated students, loud noises, and ruined materials. Students that did not want to be in the classroom made it clear to the teacher and other students that they had better things to do. It was extremely disheartening to be in the class and think back about my experiences.

Going into my first day at the New Paltz Middle School I was expecting the worst. I expected crayons to be flying, students to be rubbing glue sticks on each other, and disrespect towards the teacher. To my surprise the classes were well under control and the students enjoyed being there! It was a great turnaround from my experience.

The Middle School runs on an A/B schedule and this Wednesday, my partner, Taylor Henshaw, and I were there for a B day. According to our teacher, Mrs. Sturgis, this was her "crazy" day. She explained to us that for each grade there is a theme the school likes the art teachers to work with. Mrs. Sturgis creates most lessons based on the theme.
On B days there is a second art teacher that shares Mrs. Sturgis's room, she follows the same themes when creating lessons. On A days, the teacher goes to the high school to help out there.

6th grade-identity and exploration
Mrs. Sturgis lesson- We caught the tail end of a technique project "Elements of Art" where the students simply learned and experimented with line, shape, form, color, value, texture, and space. 
Second teacher's lesson- Students created a "locker name poster." Each student wrote their name and decorated the piece to be laminated and posted outside their locker as well. When looking around, students created very unique and individual designs. Some were quite interesting! One student had balloons holding up each letter in the sky and another had all the letters of his name stacked on a desk.

7th grade- liberty
Mrs. Sturgis lesson- Students created a "locker word art project." In this project, students picked a word that described a close friend. On an 8x8 piece of paper, students wrote their word and incorporated it into a drawing and collage piece which covered the entire paper. Their final drawing was scanned and copied, each student then used their original and two other drawings for their final locker poster. Students were asked to glue the three pieces to a long black piece of paper which would then be laminated and taped to the outside of the lockers. Some words students used were epic, funny, athletic, and unique.
7th graders will be taking a field trip to see the Statue of Liberty and there they will create sketches and drawings based on their experience there.

8th- pop culture and current art
I found myself mostly interested in the 8th grade lesson. This was one of the first days for the introduction of this new project for the students. In the "Pop Art Project," students will pick someone in popular culture today and through the computer tool paint, they will create a bright colored pop art image. For the intro to this lesson, Mrs. Sturgis showed multiple short videos about 5 artists. I thought this was a great technique because it was not one long movie that students would either love or hate. They had multiple 1-5 minute videos to watch, so if they did not like it they could find information through the second video. The artists she introduced to the students were Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Harring, and The Art Guys. After showing the videos she handed out a worksheet in which the students needed to fill out three pieces of information they learned from the videos.
 

Wayne Theibaud

 

Roy Lichtenstein

Overall it was an enjoyable first day and I can't wait for next week!

Le Cadavre Exquis

We Make Money Not Art

After searching through the site a little bit, I discovered the exquisite corpse game taken to the next level! Many of us have played this game as children or read about it in class. We have introduced the idea of creating sculptures based off the final product, adding new materials and creating a collage, and now Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall have reinterpreted the game to create Le Cadavre Exquis.
Members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The piece is uploaded online within minutes and textual narrative is then created by online participants through a narrative suggestion feature. 




Nottingham Contemporary 1st September 2011, 13:50:46

As for response from the audience, "Some people have been reflective, a few declined but the overwhelming majority have been excited and more than happy to be involved in something creative and user-generate."



Nottingham Contemporary 4th September 2011, 14:17:18

This interactive piece follows the new media literacy of performance (the ability to adopt the alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery). By having the audience dress up in costumes and react to previous videos, they create the stop motion clip by improvising and reacting to what they see.
Check out my post about Participatory Culture for more information about all of the new media literacies!

Participatory Culture

This weeks reading was Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. "According to Pew Internet and American Life project, more than 1/2  of all teens have created media content. 1/3rd of teens who have used the internet have shared content they produced."
Emphasized in the reading is a participatory culture. By these teens being involved in the culture, they are in a culture with "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations."

"New literacies" are the way students will be learning and creating. Also the way we will be teaching. There are multiple skills involved with the literacies.
Play- capacity to experiment with on'es surroundings as a form of problem solving
Performance- adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation- interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world process
Appropriation- meaningfully sample the remix media content
Multitasking- scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition- interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence- pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment- evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation- follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking- search for synthesize and disseminate information
Negotiation- travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

             I found myself returning to the concept of play and performance. Though the reading did not specify art related instances, I believe through my experience play and performance and wonderful skills to use to engage students in the subject matter.
             If I look back at my little cousins, they are playing video games, watching movies and television shows that educate them with math, art, and language. In the early stages of learning, children are geared to understand a highly stimulated type of education. I find myself losing interest in an average history book compared to a video with music in the background, multiple images on the screen, constantly changing. I was the same as a child as I am now, but I believe with consistent techniques students would grasp more then they do now.
              If my little cousins begin their education with videos and play to learn, they should be able to grow with more challenging play. As teachers, by bringing play and performance into the classroom we are engaging our students, allowing them to experience rather than lecturing hoping they listen.
            Through Theory and Practice we have learned multiple games to play with students as "warm-ups." This is something I wish I had done when I was a student. I remember warm ups being a power point presentation of a couple slides of an artists work rather than artist trading cards.

            An example I am particularly fond of is the game Medieval Space. This is when students are asked to create online profiles for various historical figures studied int heir classes. Since students are already extremely interested in social networks, why not incorporate that into a lesson? Create a Facebook for Picasso. This will allow for students to research artists and become creative with stories and images. This is definitely something I would be interested in doing with a middle school or high school level class.

Ryan McGinness

Ryan McGinness is an American artist working in Manhattan. "Known for his original extensive vocabulary of graphic drawings which use the visual language of public signage, corporate logos, and contemporary iconography, McGinness creates paintings, sculptures, and environments."

Here is an artist worksheet I created based off his works. He uses very bright colors that I find eye catching!

How many shapes/ objects can you find here? What are they?

What is negative space? How does the artist create negative space?

What symbols are used here?                    What do you think they represent?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you were to represent yourself through symbols, what would you choose?

What makes this an engaging installation?

What is repetition?                                        How does repetition enhance this installation?

Teacher Examples of Surrealist Lesson

Here are two examples of what I would use for my first lesson.
Inspired by the surrealist games, students would begin by playing the sentence game!
This is great for people all ages.
Begin with a group of 4 or more--each person has a pile of papers about 5 or 6 sheets high--the game begins by each player writing a random, descriptive sentence on the first sheet-- pass the pile to your left-- based off the sentence, draw a picture that illustrates what the first player wrote-- place sentence underneath pile-- create sentence based off picture.
And so on and so forth-- when everyone finishes with the last sheet of paper, go around the circle and share! You will get a good laugh from this exercise.

Here are some of the examples from when I played with my group.

(Sorry, you are going to have to tilt your head to read this one!)

After the groups play this warm up game they will have to collaborate to create a final piece. It can be a narrative piece or abstract involving some of the images drawn and words used.

Here are some of the examples I came up with from the warm up games.

 

What words would you add to this drawing?

      

Postmodern Abstract Art Book

After creating the Principles and Elements Panorama Art Book using the given instructions, I have recreated it by incorporating Postmodern Principles into the instructions. 

Postmodern Principles (PMP):
Appropriation, Juxtaposition, Recontextualize, Layering,
Text and Image, Hybridity, Gazing, Representing

Materials:
Magazines
Scissors
Glue sticks
Markers
Colored Pencil


1. Choose a single shape. Make 10 or more of your chosen shape.

2. Make these with variations of size or form. Experiment with the PMP Layering. Layer your shapes and paste down on first panel after discussing the technique of layering.

3. Create emphasis by adding images cut in the shape you chose. Paste to second panel.

4. Create emphasis and contrast by experimenting with text and image. Add text to your images on the same panel. Discuss PMP Interaction of Text and Image, how the text relates to the images, if the words are self explanatory or if more descriptive words are needed.

5. Recontextualize images chosen on next panel. Use markers or colored pencils to put your subject chosen in a different context.

6. Choose one more PMP for the last panel. See if you can incorporate images, shapes, or PMP from the earlier panels to create a sense of unity throughout all panels.