As an educator I firmly believe it is the duty of the schools and teacher’s to design and implement a user friendly interactive Web 2.0 media site that explains, trains and tests parents and students to prepare them for our 21st century curriculum's that will take place in the classroom as well as within asynchronous and synchronous web sites. This type of training should be mandatory and incorporate each type of Web 2.0 examples, rules, regulations and a final test along with a contract stating that the adult or student agrees to be a thoughtful, ethical and responsible digital citizen. After passing the test there will be a ceremony with certificates awarded and membership into the 21st Century Digital Citizen Resource and Safety network. Each 21c-DCz will be asked to be an advocate, guardian and guide to help spread the tenants and principals of exemplary 21c-DCz practices.
Having reviews and updating the guidelines will be needed throughout the year along with awarding nominated 21c-DCz’s with prizes for being good role models that report abuse, show respect, cite sources, ask permission, and create and share their own materials. This kind of education is needed and should be part of our standard expectations within each school so that we can easily transition and assimilate cutting edge technologies to aid us in our pursuit for more engaging, current, learning tools and skills. This is the age of connectivity and if we don’t stay connected we will loose our students and our abilities to relate to the worlds' technical evolution.
And now for some more Fab info from our wonderful NAEA: This was taken from a PDF and was hard to copy and paste into Blogger but I did my best.....Credits for this are under the article.
In the future, the POTENTIAL range of digital worlds for art teaching is endless…
Digital media, created using electronic communication
tools, surrounds us as a paradigm shift in education
simultaneously is taking place (Alexenberg, 2006; Lu, 2010;
Stokrocki, 2007; Sweeny, 2011b). Children as young as 6
years old are dressing their avatars (visual persona that they
customize), decorating their rooms, and networking with
friends on Club Penguin and the Pet Society (just two of
many popular virtual worlds for children). For adults, one of
the most prominent digital sites created almost entirely by
its “inhabitants” is Second Life (SL), with “an all time high of
126 million users hours in …2009” and an economy of “half
a billion US dollars, making Second Life the largest virtual
economy in the industry” (Linden, 2010). Even senior citizens
are starting their own geezer brigades on SL. Aside from
their entertainment value, these worlds offer art, business,
and educational opportunities for adults and youth, as well
as occasions to network with people around the world. The
educational resources are endless, including components
such as cultural understandings, medical advice, library
components, and artmaking and exhibiting artwork, to
name a few possibilities. By the end of 2011, Gartner Inc.
(2007) predicted, 80% of active Internet users would have a
presence in some virtual world. Teaching therefore requires
uncertain and changing pedagogical practices that are open
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ended, daring, and risky (Barnett, 2007). So how do we teach,
learn, and assess results in these new digital worlds?
Digital Culture
Players participate and immerse themselves in the new
digital worlds through building digital culture. Digital
implies electronic technology and its major components.
Jenkins (2004) includes behaviors such as “play performance,
simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distribution,
cognition, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking,
and negotiation” (pp. 3-4). Intellectual practices range from
collaborative problem-solving to computational literacy, and
even informal scientific reasoning (Steinkuehler, 2009) that
involves several diverse types of digital media. These range
from serious video games (Parks, 2008) and digital animation
(Davenport & Gunn, 2009) to virtual worlds (Stokrocki &
Andrews, 2011), to name a few. These media enable students
to form various virtual communities that are linked with
Web 2.0 tools. Digital media are emerging into new complex
pedagogical learning sites that are products of informal visual
culture influences that support equal, collaborative efforts
from group members (Wilson, 2008). Contemporary culture
can be viewed as“the collective heritage of a group, that is, as
a catalog of ideas and practices that shape both the collective
and individual lives and thoughts of all members,” as well as
something that“only exists in the act of being performed, and
it can never stand still or repeat itself without changing its
meaning” (Bauman, 2004, Note 1, p. 21). Such digital culture
immersion requires use of new literacy forms.
Media Literacies
Traditionally, art education literacy usually involved reading
and writing to obtain knowledge, even including vocabulary
involving video game terminology. New forms of graphic
literacy now are emerging that are referred to as digital or
media literacy (Snyder & Bulfin, 2007). Media literacy can
be integrated with text-based forms to participate in a new
global society that is currently emerging (Delacruz, 2009).
Duncum (2004) argues for multiliteracies, “the making of
meaning through the interaction of different communicative
modes,” including music, gesture and motion, sounds, and
pictures (p. 253). Virtual worlds, including video games,
require operational, cultural, and technological literacies
(Guzzetti, Elliott, & Welsch, 2010). For example, operational
literacies include translating tutorials, procedures, and
applications using Photoshop; cultural literacies involve
understanding meanings within a given context, such as
a video game in leisure activities; technological literacies
contain visual and print texts, rules, and play maneuvers as
found in digital storytelling. Such practical understanding
entails soliciting peer cooperation and collaboration to try
out new games, critiquing them, offering suggestions, giving
advice about character and thematic building, and soliciting
contributions from peer audiences.
So HOW do we teach, learn, and assess results in these new digital worlds?
Using SL as an example, art educator Lu (2010) offered practical
learning principles for designing digital events for students in
virtual worlds. Those principles include learning by exploring,
developing a sense of self through avatar identity, collaborating
with others, collecting or uploading individual artworks,
creating personal rooms and sculptures, and expressing
and recording adventures through snapshots and writing
reflections. Other art educators also have presented virtual-
world learning experiences for students; Liao (2008) focused
on avatar identity, and Carpenter (2009) designed a classroom
where students could be observed continuously without the
teacher interfering in their individual learning modes.
Digital world users communicate through chat and instant
message functions, discover new sites, design new spaces,
share services, and exchange goods (Wilbur, 2008). They
also learn to communicate in a form of hybrid sentence
structure that contains abbreviations, facial expressions
pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, shortened
words, and specific vocabulary with spelling errors (Black &
Steinkuehler, 2006). Similar to video games, virtual worlds do
not substitute for literacy activities, but rather produce new
ones collaboratively (Gee, 2007).
New Communication Arenas and Visual Literacy
With literacy forms and functions rapidly changing in
today’s postmodern world, multimedia fluidity in different
communication arenas have expanded into multi-literacies
that include video, pictures, music and dance, computer
languages, Internet casual speech, and games, as well as
in print (Thomas, 2007). Most of the May 2009 issue of
Educational Researcher involved discussions over how to
expand on these new literacies that “include new skills,
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strategies, dispositions, and social practices that are required
by new technologies for information and communication”
(Burns, 2006). Such new literacies are multifaceted, multi-
dimensional, and include multiple points of view.
Students also must be visually literate to navigate the
real world, which includes decoding, understanding, and
analyzing the meanings and values communicated by
images. “Just as readers of text draw inferences and construct
meaning from written representations of language, viewers
of images also draw meaning”(Burns, 2006, p. 2). Art teaching
and learning contexts are the primary place in today’s schools
where art students discuss the elements and grammar of
images, composition and camera perspectives, symbols,
props, clothing, color, light, text, and similar concepts. They
learn to read digital instructions as well, and create their
own Web pages and digital journals (Thomas, 2007), all of
which require diverse forms of learning. Higher education
art educators are in the process of inspiring schools to
adopt some of these ever-expanding educational forms in
a variety of ways for students to explore and experiment by
promoting imagination and immersion in cultures otherwise
inaccessible, and to integrate their art learning with other
technologies and disciplines (Salman, 2009).
New Forms of Visual Art Learning
Learning involves processing new knowledge, behaviors,
skills, values, or preferences in different ways. The formation
of learning based on the written word is changing, as images
dominate text and as screens overtake paper as the most
frequentmeansofdistributinginformation(Kress,2003).Since
digital worlds can be game-like, Gee (2007) presents three
kinds of current modes of learning in which art education
plays a major role: situated cognition (that is, contextual
learning including material, social, and cultural forms); new
literacy study that involves economic, historical, and political
concerns; and connectivism that stresses human powers of
pattern recognition. This call for networks of people, tools,
and technologies, as well as school programs to build better
modes of learning through media literacy, matches well with
future goals set for contemporary art education theory and
practice.
A number of questions arise about art education’s role in this new digital culture environment.
How do art teachers and school systems find a workable
balance between digital learning and real-life fact/process
learning? Digital learning can supplement real-life teaching
since it offers unique art instruction skills for diverse
audiences. These new technologies enable average people to
archive, add comments to, and alter content. Innovative and
pervasive networking forms, personified by weblogs, have
blossomed from the bottom up, and participation requires
that art teachers and art students mutually learn together
(Kellner & Share, 2005). There now is a remix of old and new
media constructed to respond to demands of novel ways of
communication through combination of recycled pieces of
information and materials.
For example, when art educators Stokrocki and Andrews
(2011) mentored disenfranchised youth to use SL to develop
their future art careers, the educators provided steps to
achieve discrete goals: learn basic communication skills,
acquire computer and digital literacy competence, develop
life skills, imagine a place for dreams, envision a home, and
build a business. One participant advertised his “in-game
architecture” via poster, and built a twisted tent-like form as
his sustainable home. (See Figure 1.)
How can art education help teachers with instructional assessment?
U.S. education is dominated by standardized
curricula, instructional systems, and assessment procedures.
Due to the complex and rapidly evolving technologies,
standardized assessments have overlooked the richness and
unpredictable nature of inquiry that includes experiential
and uniform reactions alike (Dewey, 1938). Learning evidence
need not be only standardized, it can be holistic, multi-
methodological, and qualitative, full of experiential evidence.
That experience encompasses the visual, audio, verbal, and
now kinesthetic, as virtual worlds enable art teachers to
view their students’ three-dimensional accounts of learning.
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Students also must be VISUALLY LITERATE
to navigate the real world, which includes
decoding, understanding, and analyzing the
meanings and values communicated by images.
Many art educators are examining these newer literacy
communication modes of engagement that can include
accounts of individual technological experiences or personal
learning environments in art (Castro, Danker, Delacruz,
Fuglestad, Roland, & Stokrocki, in press). Art education is
situated to be in the forefront of building practical arguments
and new assessments for success and interdisciplinary
connections (Salman, 2009). In her case study of three art
teachers using technology in midwestern high schools, Lin
(2009) noted that when making podcasts with Latino youth,
the teachers learned with the students about art content and
mastering digital media technology.
How does art education help students become more criticalof digital culture?
Art educators see the role of digital media
not only as an expressive exchange, but also as embodying
socio-cultural change (Garber, 2004; Keifer-Boyd, 2004;
Stokrocki, 2007). Gude (2007) argued for“reconstructing social
spaces by transforming [them] with images and texts and a
space that stimulated wonder in the process of learning” (p.
13). Young people, however, as “digital natives may be skilled
with social networking …[but] they are not generally skilled
with online information use, including locating and critically
evaluating information” (Leu, O’Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry,
& Everett-Cacopardo, 2009, p. 266). Critical digital literacy,
advocated by Buckingham (2006), is a means for eliminating
marginalized peoples, misinformation, commercial predators,
and cyber-bullying. Sweeny (2004) critically examined the
nature of privileged forms of visual culture, and explained
that art educators who teach about these new social creations
and critical forms should critique those aspects “that are
exclusionary, biased, and retrograde” (p. 210) in order to build
democratic art education theory and practice.
Whatever the future brings, digital worlds will be vibrant sites
for investigating these new participatory multi-literacies in art
education. Art educators Lily Lu (2008), creator ofThe Art Café,
and Sandrine Han, founder of the International Art Education
Association (InAEA) on SL, have designed their own meeting
transcend individual expression to incorporate collaborative
design, exhibition spaces for uploaded artworks, three-
dimensional constructions built by avatars, and virtual field
trips to different sites for building career awareness in the
arts. In the future, the potential range of digital worlds for art
teaching is endless, as art educators enable their students to
learn, plan, construct digitally, and transform their plans into
real-world possibilities.
TAKEN FROM:
Visual Arts and Multiliteracies in a Digital Age
Mary Stokrocki
Professor of Art Education, Arizona State University
Mary.Stokrocki@asu.edu
Living in Actual and Digital Visual Worlds:
One Big Goal for Art Education
Brent Wilson
Professor Emeritus of Art Education,The Pennsylvania State University
bgw1@psu.edu
Envisioning a Future Techno-Infused
Eco-Pedagogy
Karen Keifer-Boyd
Professor of Art Education andWomen’s Studies
The Pennsylvania State University
kk-b@psu.edu
