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.