Week 1:Teaching with Technology

Week One: Video Responses

I found myself fully engrossed in each of the videos we watched this week.  I started with Cindy Foley, then moved to the Sir Ken Robinson and ended with Mitchel Resnick's video.  I have used Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk's in other classes and am very familiar with his work, the other two speakers were new to me I think this progression helped me build upon the different ideas of learning, technology, and art.  I like to notes the old fashion way so I uploaded them below.  But I wanted to highlight a portion of each video I found most interesting.

CINDY FOLEY: TEACHING ART OR TEACHING TO THINK LIKE AN ARTIST

1. Art Education now focuses on the concrete and what is testable

I had not realized that most of my art education had been based on this idea, especially my art history studies done during my BA.   The art history I was exposed to was based on dates, name, and ideas all that reappeared and was to be regurgitated on tests.  It is also interesting to compare the ideas of our current art education system with actual art production.  This is something that became really apparent to me this winter while I was studying art making at Oxbow.  The place were art education and art making set their foundations and then control the development of are so drastically different that it surprised me.  I was under the impression that art making and art education would originate from the same place and grow based on the same principals but they are not.  I think Cindy Foley gives these ideas clear expression.

2. Moving to teach for creativity by embodying artist's habits 

In order to teach creativity, and in my opinion bring art education in line with art making, teachers have to teach students how to be artists.  That is not an easy objective especially with the current education system in direct opposition to this.  Foley lays outs three ways that teacher's can help students embody artists and start connecting education with the artistic process. These three big ideas cover the ways in which artist think and engage knowledge differently and more effectively.
1. Comfortable with ambiguity
2. Idea Generation
3. Trans-disciplinary research

RSA ANIMATE: CHANGING EDUCATION PARADIGM WITH SIR KENNETH ROBINSON

As I stated in the beginning, I used Sir Kenneth Robinson's TED Talk about Creativity as a final project last semester about Creativity an how to teach it to students so I am very familiar with his work.  I think his ideas are exactly what we need and hopefully will lead our current educational revolution

1. Reasons for reforming public education 

Sir Kenneth Robinson lists 2 reasons for reform in our current system;
1. Economic- How do we educate our children to take their place in economies of the 21st century given we can predict next week
2. Cultural- How do we keep cultural identity so we can pass on our cultural genes while being part of globalization.
These are the current problem perplexing our current education system. Its biggest problem is that we are trying to meet future demands by what we have done in the past which is based on the academic abilities of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classics.


1. The ADHD Epidemic

The arts are the biggest victim of this so called epidemic which according to Sir Kenneth is not an epidemic but a mentality of the educational system. I think this is his most important point.

"Arts give aesthetic experience which is when the senses are operating at their peak"

"ADHD drugs give anesthetic experience which is when the senses are shut off and the child is deaden inside"

Thus in order to get children through education we have to anesthetize them.  This is not the right answer and thus requires a change in the paradigm and a need to go in the exact opposite direction of our current system of standardization and testing and instead invest in Divergent and Creative thinking.

MITCHEL RESNICK: MIT LIFELONG KINDERGARTEN

1. Kids need to design and create technology instead of just interacting and consuming it.

Resnick states that kids today need to grow-up as creative thinkers and learners but they are not given that chance in traditional schooling expect in kindergarten.  Only kindergarten are we given the opportunity to explore, investigate, and create based on playing, observing, and working with other in order to learn and develop as creatively.  This is seen in his project of giving kids lego sets with digital and robotic components so that students can begin to build and make their own robots instead of just interacting with the final project.   Another great example is the idea to let all kids learn coding because just like writing, giving students the knowledge of coding allows them to be able to express themselves.   He needs with the 4 Ps he sees as the most important parts of education and what needs to be included in all education not just kindergarten; projects, peers, passion, and play.

Week One: Reading Response

ART TEACHING FOR THE NEW AGE BY SEAN BUFFINGTON

Art making has radically changed thus art education needs to follow suite.  Notions of what it means to create has changed and educators are now faced with new tasks in order to accommodate for these changes.

1. Educator need to help develop judgement in students

2. Educators need to help them to see that creating is a way of learning

In order to do this them need a new type of system.  This is where the idea of Liberal Art Curriculum is introduced.  It is one focused on design as problem solving, on artistic expression as then articulation and interrogation of ideas.  This addresses the need of educational structure that takes instability and unpredictability as its starting point.