First, scattered, random thoughts:
- When creating work electronically, I worry about the difference for students between finding information and understanding content. I have seen wonderful presentations that, when I ask the student to explain the words they are presenting on the screen ("What do you mean when you stated that 'Edward Weston later repudiated his involvement with Pictorialism?'") they often have no idea-- they simply had done the copy/paste thing.
- It's hard sometimes to both find the time to critique student work and get a good conversation started. I'm intrigued by the possibilities of engaging in critiques online, through blogs or wiki sites. What's easier-- a wiki page, or each student with their own blog? Can a single blog page be set up for the class, each student with their own page within that?
- Space and formatting is an issue with blogs and wikis-- with my digital photo classes, we shoot in large (often 8-10 MP) resolution, for printing purposes. But that results in each student using anywhere from 500 MB to 2-3 GB of storage for their work. Too much to host online using these free resources? Also, at full resolution their images will take forever to upload and will be too large for the display space. This would involve having students go through the extra step of making small-res versions of everything they shoot, resulting in two copies of all their work. I'm not sure if this is better than our current system of showing work in class from USB flash drives or CDs, where a students could, say, show us all 50 pics they shot in glorious full-res.
- In the Visual Arts we are moving towards assessing students less exclusively on the finished work, and more on the "Habits of Mind" displayed during the art-making process: Engage, Envision, Observe, Reflect, etc. Coming up with a way to legitimately measure "Observe" and "Reflect" has been a challenge-- blogs and wikis seem like a great way to measure this. Kind of like Matt Simms' graded round table discussions, only online and outside of class. It would also be a way to have students peer review their own work for proofreading, as well as read each other's thoughts on some of the questions they are asked to consider ("What is the difference between art & entertainment?" "Do we as a society suffer from visual overload?")
- One (hopefully) positive side effect from using blogs is promoting maturity and etiquette when commenting online. I am appalled at how people routinely respond to news articles, etc. in the comment section on various sites.
- Personal pet peeve-- the uniformity of design and lack of control in customizing the look of the blog pages. As a visual artist, I can't stand the idea of using someone else's stock art as the background of my page. Or not be able to upload my own.
- Great way to find and share websites with valid and useful info on research projects...
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