For some reason I couldn't blog or tweet at Learning 2.0 this year so here's my non-live-blogged reflection. One of the great strengths about Learning 2.0 is explained in its tagline, Connect, Create, Collaborate. The conference provides time to make connections and share ideas both through un-conference sessions and time to meet and talk to colleagues who share your job description and professional interests. When I arrived on Friday morning, I immediately ran into Breen O'Reilly, my good friend and IB Film guru. It was already a great conference before the first session. Breen shared some great film resources with me, including:

• Rob Ager's Film Analysis Youtube Channel. He's got some really neat insights into The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not sure that I'm on board for all of his theories, but in some instances he makes some pretty interesting arguments- especially in his theory
• Idea for a music in film project: Students choose a film, and analyze how the many ways that music can construct meaning - it can reflect the time period, give more layers of information through relevant lyrics, build tension, and advance the tone or theme.
• Then there's The Wilderness Downtown- a fun way of incorporating video with some neat google tech.
• Breen showed me a cool student film that involved two shots running next to each other on a white screen. I assumed that his students had used Final Cut to achieve the effect- but they'd used Keynote! They embedded two videos and exported the slide as a .mov file. It looked great!

I then ran into my good friend & film festival collaborator Michael Lambert who showed off his school's new video studio - complete with green room, control room, teleprompter, and Tricaster. Yes. I'm jealous.

This year, the conference introduced learning cohort sessions which accounted for about half the time in the conference. During these sessions, participants met to discuss education and pedagogy under common strands. I chose Digital Literacy, led by Wes Fryer. In this cohort session we discussed how to create and assess media projects. Although I felt like most of what was covered was familiar, it did give Breen and I a chance to talk about our own digital projects and challenge us to create our own Pecha-Kucha to present to the class. I'd already assigned my own students a Pecha-Kucha to explain their IB Film documentary project. Breen and I presented a segment about light in art- starting with illuminated manuscripts and ending with 21st century cinema. I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a second, but as a side note, in the process of putting together our project, I came across a great 360 panorama of the interior of one of my favorite installation pieces, Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kasuma. This artwork involves walking into a mirrored room lit by dangling colored lights. The mirrors on all sides make it feel like the room extends forever even though the entire enclosure is probably not more than 10 square feet. The panorama gives you a sense of what its like, but its best experienced first hand.

Back to the topic at hand- putting together the Pecha-Kucha was a challenging experience, and helped me determine reasonable parameters for the students presentations. The rest of the resources that were put together for the Digital Literacy cohort are compiled at the Talk with Media Wiki.
In one of the first un-conference sessions, I attended a discussion of iPads in education. Truth be told, as much of an apple geek as I am, I wasn't really interested in buying one (although if they added a camera I could have been easier to convince). However, I was just about converted when I found out that you could create a virtual textbook - with embedded pictures and video - in Pages, and then export your book as an .pub file and upload it to iTunes. You can then put that virtual text book on your iPhone, iTouch, or iPad. Its even does the whole flippy pages thing.

In another un-conference session, I had the chance to meet other techy art teachers and discuss some things that we're doing in our classes. Here we all are- and do notice one of the studios with a green room behind us. That's the back-up green room. Yowza. Back to our conversations - of course I promoted the F L O A T project, but rather than go through and explain each neat project, I'll simply provide the links that we recommended to each other.

Jane's website
Kelly's website
Animoto
Art Ed 2.0
Asia Region Art Educators
Zbrush (3 dimensional painting program)
One (of many) projectors for iphone/itouch
Online learning: eClass

One Million Bones: A collaborative project.

In also attended a great session about collaborative learning with Kim Cofino and Julie Lindsay. Both are doing amazing things with connecting classrooms around the world and I was most interested to hear about their online global education conference.

Finally, I attended a cool session on 3D virtual environments led by Bill Clark at the Nanjing International School. I'm so excited for the possibilities of collaborating globally in a virtual world- although I've been struggling with how to implement it. Bill seems to be developing some amazing opportunities along these lines. It was great to meet Bill -he and I have collaborated on the Rotoball Project- and his students have done amazing 3D work in Blender.
To me, the most fascinating thing about the Learning 2.0 conference is that it is constantly re-inventing itself. This is not a streamlined process and mistakes are made, but that's what happens when you take risks. Every year the conference is something a little different and it grows in new and unexpected ways- a critical method for creating new possibilities. In that way it mirrors what I love best about progressive education.

It was great to see old friends and meet new ones at Learning 2.010- I'm already looking forward to 2.011!

Would have been great to get this fantastic use of the ipad into student hands for our Paint the World with Light project. Message to Dentsu: could you please please please make this an app?

Today was one of those days when I felt like I got more out of my students than they got out of my class- but that's actually a nice feeling.

September 12th marks the beginning of National Arts in Education Week; and although I'm blogging from outside the nation, I'm still happy to participate in a circle of blogs celebrating this event. Congress has signed resolution H.CON.RES.275.RFS which recognizes the importance of art in education and makes the following commitment to art education:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--
(1) supports the designation of Arts in Education Week;
(2) calls on governors, mayors, and other elected officials from across the United States to issue proclamations to raise awareness of the value and importance of arts in education; and
(3) encourages the President to issue a proclamation encouraging the people of the United States to observe such week with appropriate activities.

While I'm all for a good awareness raising, and fond indeed of appropriate activities, I thought I'd blog today about what my Arts Education Week Resolution would state:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--

(1) supports the arts through increased funding and through the hiring of highly qualified art teachers.
(2) recognizes that in order to keep America competitive in the 21st century, we need to educate students who can think both critically and creatively and imagine new possibilities.
(3) agrees that as art teaches us what it means to be human through the act of creation and the investigation into the experience of being human, and cannot therefore be relegated to an 'elective'.
(4) demands that arts education be made a right of all students.

Well, a guy can dream. While we're at it, lets make number (5) chocolate every friday. In the meantime, here is what some of my fellow art teaching bloggers are saying about National Arts in Education Week:

The Art Teacher's Guide to the Internet
The Teaching Palette
Wonder Brooks Extraordinaire
Mrs. Gillespie's Blog

Update: Lois Girbino has some great thoughts on Art in Education week over at More Art 24/7. Here's a great quote that just nails it on the head:

Wonderful teachers exist in all content areas, but creative thinking, the kind of thinking that happens every day in “the arts”, is where our innovators of the future develop the habits of mind today. Beyond the concrete proof of brain scans during creative exercises, isn’t the world a more refined and beautiful place when we have art?

After a successful run of our first book, Paint the World with Light, the Student Creative is proud to announce our second student challenge, FLOAT. Where Paint the World challenged students to create unique works of long exposure photography, Float asks students to use high speed photography. With a high shutter speed, students will capture a moment to fast to be seen with with the naked eye, and freeze time in such a way to create an image of magical realism.

For the last few years, I've kicked off my IB Year 2 Film classes with Stanley Kubrick's classic The Shining. In addition to all the thematic layers on which it can be analyzed, the amazing technical aspects, and how those elements intersect in such fascinating ways- its just an engaging film that (to my mind anyway) its still scary-as-all-get-out 30 years later.

The new Adobe Education Exchange has some truly amazing resources, thanks in part to the recent challenge that they offered to submit your best digital lessons and ideas. Adobe has just announced that the winners are in.

I'm thrilled to announce that our first two projects from The Student Creative were both listed as 'runners up'! Paint the World With Light (buy your copy now, proceeds still benefit the Jacaranda School in Malawi) is our first book of student light paintings from 20 schools around the world. Our new project, Float, got a 'runner up' nod as well- even though we haven't officially begun! Congratulations to all the teachers that participated (and will participate), and especially to Matt Cauthron (another art ed rock star) and Mike Skocko, my co-conspirators collaborators on these projects. More news on Float coming very soon...

A big congratulations to Nicole Dalesio, who in addition to having three tutorials listed as 'runners up' won first prize for her tutorial on using Photoshop to make scratch art:

Last night as I was reading through my favorite art ed blogs & sites, I came across two incredible and inspiring stories of teachable moments in the art room. The first is from Tricia Fuglestad's elementary art room at Dryden elementary school. Tricia was doing a lesson on pop art dogs (pup art, of course), and one frustrated student discarded a drawing he saw as a mistake.