In October, Otago Polytechnic’s Research Office included Su Ballard and I in their monthly publication for our work on the Digital Literacy paper, and our discussion at the ANZAAE conference in April.

Download a .pdf of the above page by clicking on the image.

Download the whole publication here (p.s. I’m also mentioned in the previous page with my work in the School of Design Desire~n Exhibition also in April.) OP Research Annual Report_Email

I have just received notification that a Good Practice Publication Grant for the above project has been awarded to Su Ballard and I. It has been awarded by Ako Aotearoa: National Centre for Tertiary Teaching and Excellence for our rescent teaching, learning and research at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic.

It’s great to get this kind of feedback on one’s work. I’ll post more as this publication begins to take shape over the next year.

Dave Geeting

Heather Marlatt

September 09 2009

I came across this website, Samesies recently, a link sent to me by my friend Jenna Todd.
“A project started to highlight how different people can essentially take the same pictures.
Curated by Alex Carman, Dave Geeting , Sophie Curtis”

It’s a relatively simple concept, and not necessarily a new one, but the simple blog design and elegant imagery works and it’s nice to check in on as it’s updated nice and regularly. However, it highlights some other projects for me that I thought I’d share.

The first one is Weather Photos: AN INTERNATIONAL PHOTO PROJECT ABOUT WEATHER, EMOTION, AND COMMUNICATING THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY
In this blog, sets of 2 individuals use photographs to communicate with each other, sharing their feelings about the weather and its influence on emotion and mood. Combining photos from partners around the world, this blog references both weather and emotion, across geography and time. Two artists, one in NY, the other in Berlin, conceived this project for Transcultural Exchange. ( Project Description )

Hege Don Samset, one of the project curators was at Art school with me, but in the way that the world is now networked via multiple intangible data sets, I came across the project via a very differently related e-mail group. The project is similar to ‘Samesies’ in its use of the blog, the regular, dated posting, the chronology…but it differs in other ways: it is more of a rolling series of photographs, rather than the concrete sets of two; it does not attempt to recreate the same image as posted before, but spring from that image, creating a responsive and work, factoring in the weather and emotion(as noted in the blurb).

Jenna and I participated in this project and you can view our images here. For me, the images became less important than the process of the project…For the first ten days of the project I was in Singapore and the last four, back in New Zealand (where I live). It was, as you might imagine, much easier to take, or be interested in taking images to post in Singapore, with my ‘tourist eyes’ on, not to mention, the lack of distraction and time by every day work.

Networking photography with social media sites is of course not new, if we think of photosets in flickr.com (and countless other sites), and similarly, being ‘pen-pals’ with people in far-flung countries is not a new concept either.

So my question is, (i think!) is there soemthing new out there? Is there something amidst this social networking with digital technologies, this need to connect over geographical distance, that we can push forward and create?

I recently worked on a project called Intertidal, part of a series of new, national and international commissions in a national (NZ) project called One Day Sculpture. Fellow artist, colleague and curator Caro McCaw and I curated the project for the Blue Oyster’s Commission. Part of the premise of the whole project was a new way of commissioning site-specific work. We both have interests across networked technolgies and through this project saw these as a way to connect a geographically disparate group of artists, callenging a notion of ’site’ through the internet. This formed the research part of the project, which developed over 1.5-2 yrs, finally culminating in site visits by the artists, and a ‘One Day Sculpture’ on the 20th December 2008.

Similar to the Weather Photos project, the experince of the online networking differed much from the expectation of it, and the realities reflected the people involved, much more than the technologies used.

(For further information on the project see writer, curator and artist Ali Bramwell’s article about it here. Or an article published in the Blue Oyster Ten Year Anniversary Publication by Caro McCaw and myself here(pages 40-45).)

So my thoughts here are far from complete, and I really wanted to post just to get started pulling some of these projects together. But if I can offer some sort of reflection on what I think I’ve just said and the experiences I’ve had, it might be something about the social, in social media. Do the websites offer enough of the personal experience involved in the creation of the shared/group outcome? And are they meant to?

This might be where my thinking is taking me… more soon!

See the news below about the recent Ako Aotearoa grant  that Dr. Su Ballard, from the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic has been awarded. I’ll be working with Su on this over the year. This is a great step for New Zealand tertiary education resources.

Copyright remix – Fair Dealing in Image Resources for a Digital Age

Practical solutions for the use of the digital image in a diverse range of teaching and learning contexts that will be available to all educators in New Zealand

The southern hub is delighted to support this exciting project that investigates the use of the digital image and the associated delivery of software and copyright information in the tertiary classroom.

Dr Susan Ballard of Otago Polytechnic and her team will draw on scenarios from student work to review current practice as it applies to the digital image (both still and moving) on and offline, examine digital images within the nexus of copyright, privacy and IP and recommend steps for evaluation and host outcomes in a digital hub. This information will enable the development of an open online and accessible for all electronic database (d*hub) of information about the use of the digital image.

We wish Susan and her team well and look forward to May 2010 when we expect d*hub’to ‘go live’.

It’s been a wile since I blogged about the Digital Literacy paper that I developed for the School of Art, Otago polytechnic. It has now gone through two iterations and I’m pretty pleased with where we are.

It is all centred around a class wiki here.

This year we made some fundamental changes to the way we delivered the content, and the way the course was manged which I believe really enabled a better learning experience for the students.

1. We developed a ‘paper’ workbook alongside the weekly tasks, rather than just have all the tasks online via the wiki. The workbook was downloadable weekly and really helped to engage learners that were struggling with using computers/digital technology. These learners found it easier to work on paper, and then stransfer their knowledged to the computer — without this step, we found they couldn’t process the information, as there was no transformative step, in this case across media from one they know how to work with, to one that they don’t. We found that students who were much more familiar with the technology in general did not need this step.
2. Students selected their own level of learning for workshop delivered skills. For the course, students are required to weekly lectures that contextualise that week’s topic, and complete the weekly tasks. (Available via the wiki and downloadable workbook.) In addition to this we run weekly workshops that teach the necessary skills to complete the tasks. Not everyone needs all of these, depending on the level of knowledge they enter with so these workshops are optional to cover the range of students we have in the course. We asked students to self-select into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced, so that the teaching of the students would be streamlined as would their learning environment. In practice this worked pretty well, however there were more beginner students than one class’ worth and few ‘advanced’ learners who wanted to extend further than they had to (For example, the advanced class was always empty…). To remedy this throughout the semester we used the ‘advanced’ workshop times to help the beginners as a catch up space. Overall though, allowing the learners to be responsible for their own understanding of what and how far they were learning seemed to work much better than the year before (when classes were a mixed level of learners).
3. The course was managed by one person, who was responsible for the structure and weekly lectures, and the workshops were taken by one (other) person for the duration of the course. In the previous year there was a case of ‘too many cooks’; the course was taught in blocks by leacturers who taught the weekly lecture and then the workshop for that week, and this changed every few weeks (which was a timetabling decision at the time). This was confusing to the students, who got different messages from each lecturer, and they really needed more consistency across the programme. This has been achieved this year. I teach the weekly lectures, and where there is a guest lecturer asked to speak in a week, I reamin there to contectualise this, and ensure there are no other weekly isssues. I also worked with Max Bellamy, who took all of the workshops. In doing so we were able to discuss the weekly schedule, ensuring the students were on track, able to modify something if there were problems, or new issues that aros across the board. Max was also able to work much more closely with the students as he first hand worked beside them as they developed their skills relevant to the programme.

Overall I feel much more satisfied with the way the teaching went across the semester – I’m waiting now to hear what the students thought…(watch this space), but I can say that there was a very high level of development from those who engaged in the class. You can see some of this through their class blogs here.

Really interesting project! Visit the website here

“A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book

In 2007, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington (Co-Directors, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. | Turbulence.org) proposed Networked to Eduardo Navas (NewMediaFIX). Along with Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange) and Anne Bray (Freewaves), they developed an application to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded the project in 2008.

An international Call for Proposals was issued. It defined the project’s Goals and Objectives and invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. A committee of nine reviewed the submissions: four authors were commissioned to develop chapters that are now open for commentary, revision, and translation. A fifth — one of the runners-up — was invited to contribute.

Networked is open to commentary, translation, and revision. We welcome your participation!

I’ve just been reading about “glow” a new project just getting underway in Scotland. It’s funded through National Lottery funding, and looks set to do a good deal of research and demonstration before it’s full set up, which I think is great. I’m still to have a good look round the glow website but I’m pretty interested in the way this project develops.

“A pioneering new initiative to bring arts education resources online for schools across Scotland has been launched by the Scottish Arts Council and Learning Teaching Scotland through Glow, the world’s first national intranet for education.” Read the full article at the Scottish Arts Council Website here.

So, I’ve been updating my blogs, in an attempt to get together a more representative online presence of myself. rather then try to do too many things in one space, i thought i would look at my existing blogs that worked (albeit sporadically in some cases) and work out how to connect them so that they would contain my thoughts, differentiate between the various things I do in my professional life, and act as a presence I can be proud of on the web.

I’ve been blogging regularly here which initially started as a way to connect to my students outside of the classroom, or to extend topics that started inside the classroom but there wasn’t time, or the facility to take further. Rather than e-mail individuals, or even the group, with interesting links and ideas, where the information ultimately gets lost in some digital grave of a sent, or inbox, I decided to go for a blog that could archive those thoughts, would enable me to ‘present’ the information in a more coherent way (compared to different e-mail settings for each receiver) and help me extend my own understanding of the uses of social media in education settings. Implementing the teaching of such technologies and ideas within the courses that I teach I also believed that I firmly had to ‘practice what I preach’ and that if I did it well, I could help lead my students to find their own ways of using the media I was foisting upon them.

So, long story short (for now!) I’m integrating that blog, with this one (and added a new one for fun!) and trying to make some (new) sense of it all. I’ve been working on several digital literacy projects over the past two years, but I haven’t been blogging about them. I’ve just realised how important they are in terms of who I am as an educator and what I believe in, so I felt I needed to vocalise this in some way. This then will be the content of this blog.

Expect some future updates then as I intially fill you in on where my projects are currently sitting and then continue to use this space for some further thinking.

I thought I might try and get down some reflections on the session at The School of Art last week before they leave my head forever…

It was a good session with a good turnout – I have 26 people who signed the e-mail list, but i think there may have been a couple more people there who didn’t. And that I know of – there were at least 11 different Schools/departments from the Polytechnic there…so it’s nice to know that there is some solidarity to what we’re doing, and it’s spreading wider than one area. I do think that a lot of those people were either from the School of Art or on the networked learning e-mail group already though…

The session

As it was the first time all these people were in the same room together I was quite keen myself to see what would happen! I hoped that people would bring up some topics and move themselves into areas they wanted to pose questions about or solve. I’m not sure this happened exactly, and I think I could have worked harder to make the session more dynamic…BUT i remind myself that it was good to lay the ground and just get introductions from everyone and their ideas/projects and that I was only facilitating and not leading…As bossy as I am I don’t want to be running any new initiative…(who has the time?!)..but I am happy to be part of a group that makes things happen.

Anyway some topics covered:
School of Art Digital Literacy Project – brief overview
Introductions
iPod project from the cookery programme (in development)
Elluminate: Problems with students not engaging
Digital Literacy, rather than learning software (This was a discussion that popped up a couple of times during the session and for me it’s a fundamental point of understanding before any digital literacy project can happen.)
Context Driven projects versus Generic Resources. (Arguments made for both sides of this. e.g. the School of Art Digital Literacy course is context specific, although the learning resources are generic. This has been seen as necessary to engage the understanding of the learners undertaking a BFA.)

Conclusion
Overall people were keen for something to happen next but perhaps at a bit of a loss as to what that could be. I suggested that everyone keen to stay in touch (assuming it was everyone in the room!) could get themselves on the networked learning e-mail group and continue discussions there – it doesn’t appear to me that there are too many people ‘talking’ on that list who didn’t come to the session anyway. I’m about to invite people from the session to do just that, but I want to get a consensus from the people who started that group first. I know there are some people not keen on the idea from a practical point of view and they’re suggesting either another e-mail group or or space to collaborate in. I can see the thinking behind this. BUT it’s hard to have that discussion without everybody communicating in the first place?!
Also – I am aware that some people are already asking for collaboration and as it has been in the past – smaller groups of people working on similar projects, so it may continue in the future. Perhaps we are only widening the network of interested parties at the moment?
Another idea from Leigh and David are to hold regular presentations/session showcasing someone’s project each time. I was hoping that people would do this more at the session last week…
Leoni is writing up her notes from the session so I’ll add anything I have missed (which I am sure is plenty!)

ttfn

Hot on the back of a new course featured here on wikieducator; (Digital Literacy taught to all year one and two BFA students), Prof. Leoni Schmidt has organised a Digital Literacy Roundtable at the School of Art for this coming Thursday. This is great news, and something that I think many people at Otago Polytechnic have been thinking and wanting to do for a while, but we’re all so busy getting our projects of the ground, teaching, (and often fighting with the technology?) that it all seems a bit impossible to sit in the same room and chat… Well hopefully that will change this Thursday and we get an opportunity to develop some good habits around our teaching and learning, together at OP.

Info about the session below:

There will be a Digital Literacy Roundtable this coming Thursday (10th April) at 3pm, hosted by the School of Art. I will be facilitating the discussion but would very much appreciate input from anyone interested, with an aim to addressing polytech-wide issues, focusing on ‘Digital Literacy’. We hope to allow and enable discussion around the following points:

- success stories! What are you involved with that’s going particularly well? Or what have you seen around you that’s going well? e.g. Phil Kerr’s blog?
- technologies What software/hardware are you working with and how is it going? Are there commonalities? (e.g. wikieducator) Can we/should we build on this?
- challenges… Are there obstacles in your way that are stopping your digital literacy projects, learning and teaching? How can we start to address these?
- projects? Do you have a project you would like to share, promote, get feedback on? e.g. Scope: Flexible Learning
- collaboration I think collaboration can be discussed across most points in this agenda, but let’s think specifically about what collaboration we can facilitate and where there are real needs to do so. Should we be looking for industry partners? Other institutions? Are we doing this already?
- moving forward Are there practical next steps that we can take to help each other’s projects, and enable more digital literacy at OP?

I’m really looking forward to this Thursday’s session, and I hope that by getting lots of us in the same room at the same time, we can develop our projects, learning and teaching in this area.
Please note that we hope to run from 3pm to 5pm, and will be in room P201, Leith Block, School of Art.

See you on Thursday! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me before then if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Warm Regards, Rachel