Digital Age Teaching
I teach digital media arts and work tirelessly to inspire student creativity by building in artistic inspiration at all levels of the course, while also exploring the creative process and working with creative flow. To prevent a Fordist approach to producing digital works, whether they be digital art, websites, animations or video, my students work individually and in groups or as a class to work through an inspiration and give it life through gradual and complementary development. We study the paintings of the Masters through the ages to learn about colour and light, study and explore photography, follow and learn from graphic design and website design trends and take time to truly appreciate digital media as an art form. Through our class blog we work together to share our experiences and development as digital media artists.
All of my courses are developed with a digital-age learning experience and assessment in mind. I have been using Moodle in my classes for 8+ years and implement it in a blended mode model of learning. Skill-building workshops are presented each class to develop various skills and artistry, and are posted on a calendar I designed in PHP. Assessment is based on a combination of real-world market value, originality and creative approaches, growth of technological skill and artistic insight and through the production of work based on real-world design issues. Further insight into work is given space on our class blog.
I model digital age work and learning, since I am also a website designer, graphic artist and photographer, SEO and internet marketing professional as well as a web-entrepreneur. Since I know how I have built and designed my own products, I share some of them with students for insight into the business and art of digital media, as well as experiences of working with a very diverse group of business people from all over the world. In order to teach blogging and digital citizenship I write up sample blogs on our class blog (some of which were published through larger organizations—exciting!) and assist students in developing their online digital voice. Hence they learn to not only consume, but also to produce knowledge. We use Twitter and Tumblr and learn to work within the confines of the fluid space of flows of cyberspace. The class also works very hard to maintain originality and respect the copyright of work online. I have done workshops, pro-d presentations and community training over the years and continue to do so. The entire focus of my work is to inspire and enable the inner artist in every student and teacher I work with, and my excitement at working with that interior artist is infectious. In my side businesses I teach social media, marketing, digital identity and branding as well as a model for just-in-time learning (which never ends, but is based on current needs of a project, client or business). Everything I teach is no older than 8 months, so it is completely current and still in the innovation mode. While this is challenging to keep up with, my students leave with a foundation of cutting-edge skills.
In ETEC 565 I would like to continue to develop my skills in building communities of practice, start looking more deeply into mobile learning solutions and experiment with solid online communication tools and educational crowdsourcing.
Every course I have taken in MET has enriched all aspects of my teaching practice, as well as my own personal insights and philosophies into the networked society, dromology and art. I look forward to the challenge and enlightenment of learning and utilizing more, guided by the rich insights and experiences of our class CoP. At some point, I would also like to begin working on a project that enables a global, integrated learning platform for secondary school, similar to our MET experience, but based on project production.