MS Word: It's Just Trying to Help, But Is It Helping?

Today I tutored a student in the Writing Center who was very dependent on Word's autocorrection and spelling suggestion features (we worked on her essay on her laptop). It made me think about our class discussions about students' computer access in general and whether students who have no access to computers have to write their essays by hand. If students write by hand, their spelling won't be automatically corrected, they won't see a wiggly red line under words with typos, and they can't right-click to get a handy list of thesaurus suggestions. That way teachers can see exactly what spelling and grammar problems their students are making repeatedly. But if teachers receive papers that have been automatically cleaned up by Word, they'll never know which spelling and grammatical issues their students need help with.

So writing papers by hand actually might not be a bad thing; of course, this would only be the case if teachers are carefully combing their students' handwritten essays for errors and taking the time to work on recurring problems.

Web Critique

Community Arts Network (www.communityarts.net)
The layout of this site is very newspapery, which immediately gives it a serious feel. And the homepage is just about as dense as the New York Times's; at first glance it appears that there's an overwhelming amount of content to read here, and I probably would never be able to catch all of it. That's why I like that articles are broken down by several different types of categories (population, social context, etc.). This allows people to find what interests them specifically instead of wading through anything related to the vast umbrella of "community arts."

At first I felt like there was a blog overload--the CANblog, guest blog, and blognet!?--but upon closer inspection I think the concept of the blognet is great. Lots of people have blogs out there and it can be hard to figure out the good ones; this list of relevant blogs (with links to them) is a useful resource. But why not streamline and put a list of them along the side of the CANblog?

The long, well-researched essays keeps this site from being just an up-to-the-minute news source or a giant collection of PR releases. (Thinly veiled PR releases are all I seem to see in the "Recent News" column. Which is OK. But after a while they make me feel paranoid.) I would probably use this site a lot if I worked for a community arts organization, both for serious research and to see what's new.

ArtsEdge (http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/)
I am a huge fan of arts integration and therefore a huge fan of this site. I'm really excited about using a lot of the visual arts lesson plans (especially the adjective monster, how cute is that?!). The How-To section (under "Teach") has so many helpful articles, and not just for art teachers--teachers of other subjects who want to integrate the arts in their classes would probably find this stuff really helpful. That makes everything on this site really doable--it's not just a bunch of hazy ideas for expert art teachers.

The no-nonsense design complements the super-organized content. Being able to search by a combination of arts subject and other subject is key.

I wonder how often this site adds new lesson plans and ideas...I hope all the time.

Art Education 2.0 (http://arted20.ning.com/)
Nice banner! I wouldn't trust a site having to do with art and technology unless it looked good. Its trustworthiness is further demonstrated by the requirement to register to access just about every part of the site. This makes it feel like it's for serious users only. But why do I have to upload my picture and list my favorite TV shows when I register? There are enough social networking sites out there; a username and password are all I really wanted to give this site.

But in the interest of this web critique, I accepted that I would have to share with the Art Education 2.0 community that my favorite movie is Amadeus and attempted to register. But alas, "this social network is under maintenance." So I am limited to critiquing the site based on the homepage alone, which is the only thing I can access without an account.

It looks there's a lot of activity on the forums, which makes something like this work. When I'm a teacher, I would love to have a group of other teachers to turn to for advice--especially for a topic like technology in art education, in case there's some aspect of technology that I'm not an expert in but want to teach. I also love that teachers use the "Current Projects" section to do the same projects as each other at the same time and then swap images of student work. I wonder if teachers show their classes the student work from other schools. That would be a pretty cool way to bring together students who go to schools with really homogenous populations, or really isolated schools. The students could even start an e-mail relationship with each other or post to message boards to discuss their processes or have interschool critiques.

I look forward to being a part of this community when the technical problems are resolved.

NAEA Blog

I'd like to remind everyone in our class to become a follower of the blog for SAIC's student chapter of NAEA. I usually send out e-mails to members about meeting dates and other important news, but I'd love for the blog to be used as a place for discussion between meetings. That way we can take care of administrative business online and have more time for skill-sharing workshops and other fun stuff when we meet in person. Thanks!

21st Century Skills

Our discussion about 21st Century Skills got me thinking about how I defend the importance of art education to people who are skeptical of my career choice. That somewhat creepy manifesto we read kept citing economic success and international competition as reasons to teach 21st Century Skills, which bothered a lot of people in the class (including me). But when I talk to people who challenge the importance and seriousness of art education (usually not in an overtly rude way...but rude nonetheless), I find myself trying to convince them that art education is important for all of these pragmatic, career-preparation-related reasons, and I neglect to mention that the experience of making art is important enough in itself. So I guess I can understand why the Partnernship for 21st Century Skills focused on advantages to the initiative that would appeal to people who only care about things that have quantifiable outcomes--after all, those are probably the sort of people who make decisions about funding.

I guess I'm in a forgiving mood because I also don't think Apple, Microsoft, etc. are evil for sponsoring this initiative. Of course they will benefit by creating brand loyalty and dependence, but hey, if they're going to put computers in schools that otherwise couldn't afford them, I say they should go ahead. Enabling students to be as technologically literate as possible will is a good thing for them--not just professionally, but creatively and socially as well.

Web Critique: SAIC Portal

I am pleased to accept this opportunity to critique the SAIC portal (go.artic.edu). My most significant grievances are as follows:

• When you compose an e-mail, you should be able to conveniently access a school-wide address book. Since e-mail addresses don't follow a simple formula (e.g., firstinitiallastname@saic.edu), I often start composing an e-mail to someone through the portal and then realize that I don't have that person's address, and I have to hunt for it somewhere else. Faculty addresses can be found on saic.edu, but where do you get student addresses if you'd like to e-mail someone who isn't in one of your classes? What if you meet someone at a school-sponsored social event or computer lab or something, exchange names, and later want to e-mail that person to hang out again--how do you get in touch? Does the school not want us to be friends with anyone outside our classes?
  
• Also regarding e-mail addresses: Why don't they let you see the address of the person you're e-mailing when you choose names from a class list? I don't understand why it's some big secret. It makes it even harder to memorize people's addresses that they won't let us access through an address book.
  
• One more e-mail thing: You shouldn't have to manually check a box to save an individual message to your Sent Items folder. All messages should be saved automatically. Who wouldn't want a record of what they sent?
  
• The personal announcements are not noticeable on the Home tab. These announcements should be routed through e-mail so people will actually receive them. The first time a professor posted a personal announcement for everyone in the class last semester, not one student saw it.
• When posting to message boards for our classes, we should be able to save drafts. I've lost a few posts after pressing the "Post" button only to discover I had been logged out.
• As the leader of a student group, I find the "Groups" section ineffective as a communication tool. If I post announcements or make updates to the group page, no one in the group is notified, and I know no one ever goes to the group page after joining it the first time. I use a blog through Blogger and e-mail instead.
  
• The fonts look very outdated. Come on, this is an art school.
  

I grudgingly admit that the portal is not totally awful. A few high points include:

• It is easy to access and use library resources from the portal.
• The job board is nice.
• I've never really investigated the "Customize Me" tab--maybe it would help improve my portal experience to move things around a little bit.
• The events calendar is comprehensive and makes it easy to quickly find out what's going on at school.
• I enjoy the slideshow of featured SAIC art on the Home tab.
  

Dealing with Peanut Allergies in Schools

The school district near where I live is considering becoming peanut-free. I've heard parents of kids with peanut allergies take both sides of this debate--some want schools to be peanut-free (this allergy can cause death), but some prefer schools to not make any special rules about peanuts/peanut butter so their kids learn to watch out for themselves, just as they have to do when they're anywhere other than their school or home. I'm not sure which side I'd take if I were a parent of a child with a peanut allergy, but if I felt confident that my kid understood what he could and couldn't eat once he reached school age, I think I might agree with those who don't want peanut-free schools.

Something in the Tribune article about the issue was alarming to me--one school in the district isn't peanut-free, but has a table in the lunchroom especially for students with food allergies. What?! I'm picturing a table full of completely mortified kids who want to disappear because they're at the weirdo allergy table. I remember how important it was to sit with your own friends in elementary school (and middle school...and high school) and I can't imagine those kids being very happy with the way their school deals with their allergies.

Web Critique: Hyde Park Art Center

The Hyde Park Art Center's homepage (www.hydeparkart.org) has a lot of information but is not too busy or dense. It's sort of long, but I don't mind scrolling down--I prefer scrolling to clicking on tons of links and waiting for pages to load. Another visual strength of the site is the banner at the top that changes when you click on each category (Home, Exhibitions, etc.). This is a good way to incorporate artwork created at the center or photos of events that took place there into a part of the site's design.

When you click on links to current and upcoming exhibitions, there is a lot of information about each featured artist. This is a great feature that I'm sure helps pique people's interest and attract them to the center. Do any of the artists whose work is being exhibited have their own websites? How about providing links to their sites on the exhibition info pages so people can find out even more?

The School & Studio part of the site is comprehensive as well. The schedule of classes by day (in addition to the list of class names) is helpful--I would love for this to be more noticeable on the page about classes offered, and it would also be nice to have it in HTML (always preferable to PDFs). When I was working full-time and taking art classes during nights and weekends, I had to consider the schedule before choosing which class to take, so it's an important way to organize things. I was also happy to see a link to short bios of the teaching artists--when I sign up for an art class, I'm always curious about the teacher. It probably wouldn't affect whether I decide to enroll, but it's just nice to see that the HPAC is proud of their teaching artists and knows that their students care who they're learning from.

The 4833 blog is a great way to post pictures and news, but is there a way for the HPAC staff to approve blog comments before they're posted? There seem to be a lot of comments full of nonsense letters posted by users with sexually suggestive names. These comments are especially alarming on posts about kids' activities. I know Blogger lets you approve comments (sent to your e-mail) before they appear publicly on your blog, so I hope this wouldn't be too hard to remedy with the blog host for this site.