As we continue to learn and add to our repertoire of digital understanding, I feel our learning developing like a Holton Rower painting, ever changing and flowing, not sure what it will look like in the end.
You can say that Rower's work is a re-mix of the color field paintings of the 40's - 60's, where artist like Rothko and Still painted massive paintings of blocks of color. Rower takes from this experience and create enormous paintings by pouring paint, lots of paint. The result is a new style of color field painting with a sixties feel of undulating color. Each color represents a new media, or digital tool, and I find myself sampling and pouring each learned artifact using different methods to see which yields the most aesthetic result.
The same way that you sit mesmerized by the movement of the paint, I find myself becoming fascinated with this digital language, as an artist I have always been curious and willing to try any medium, and now with teaching and the exposure to all that the digital era has to offer I feel like there is a whole new art store at my finger tips.
Lankshear and Knobel, synthesize literacy and the digital age by theorizing that all this meme and gif, blogs and tweeting along with every other shorthand communication are all the new literacy, the new way that our culture artifacts and documents the stories of our days, and I think that they are right. I was awakened to the idea that many things are re-mixed and the context of the word is forever changed in my mental dictionary, as the word art has so many times. As I become more comfortable and understanding of the media, my creating becomes more 'mine', and I am able to start to express myself digitally. The daily creates continue to challenge my process in a good way as I challenge myself more to use the mediums presented and seek out new ones.
I loved reading A open letter to my students, Shaffer's philosophies on teaching are so similar to mine. As I read through the article, I saw the correlation to this class, the discovery and exploration that must be student driven, I can imagine that trying to lecture on digital story telling would be about the same as a lecture on pouring paint, BORING! I feel that learning is all about the self discovery, trying to post a video what feels like several million times before it works, is far more memorable than just being told how to do it, conquering the task, that feeling is what I try to teach my students to look for.
As the class for me begins to flow like paint from the cup, each week creating a new vision of digital media, I think that I have picked the perfect complement in Art as my focal theme, there is always as artist, period or medium that relates to the learnings, and an endless supply of street art to help support my thoughts and express my emotions. It has also become my online art room this summer as I hope to encourage people to look more at the art around them, expose the readers of my blog to new artists and a different artist with every post.
Art and literacy hold a lot in common, they are both not something that can not be described in black and white and both will forever change based on the the time and culture of the people seeking to describe them. The value of both will changed based on the viewer, seller and purchaser of the item being traded, but both will always rather intentional or not, will document and speak to the moment they were created.
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