Using Technology in Creative Ways in Schools
After relationships based on trust are established, artists can begin the serious work of play. Improvisation is an important part of collaboration. Using unfamiliar tools can help create situations where the artist must leave that expertise behind and become a partner in learning. Software and hardware is constantly changing, this offers even more opportunities for improvisation.
"In almost anything you might do today, you have got to improvise. There is simply too much change for tradition to handle: there are too many possibilities for any methodology to anticipate in advance... In all kinds of work people take pride in thinking on their feet, inventing solutions when under pressure, and practising originality in the face of risk. They just don't call it play."
Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, MIT Press, 1996
Feel confident to seize the moment to develop a new idea. People think you need to be an expert to use new media.
'Creative Misuse' (you don't have to be an expert)
"What sets art apart from other technological endeavors is not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it... for to use a tool as it was intended, whether a screwdriver or spreadsheet, is simply to fulfill its potential. By misusing that tool-that is, by peeling off its ideological wrapper and applying it to a purpose or effect that was not its maker's intention-artists can exploit a technology's hidden potential in an intelligent and revelatory way."
"Ten Myths of Internet Art", Jon Ippolito, Guggenheim, NY, USA (my emphasis)
New Media provides new ways of working
- Planning for new media technology requires an openness and freedom to explore in a new way.
- Working with new media gives artists the ability to make artwork never conceived before. They enable us to make work which could not exist in any other format.
- To use new technologies to slavishly mimic art which could exist in other media can be interesting but in the end is pointless.
- New media is an extremely inappropriate medium
if you know what the outcome is going to look like.
Things to keep in mind when working in Education with New Media
- Build relationships and trust as a basis for collaborative work
- Include time for group planning at the start of the project
- Build in time for group reflection upon completion of the project
- Start small, less is more.
- Allow time when children can just play on a piece of software
- Allow time for yourself to play
- Allow for processing time equal to creating time
- Be realistic about the possibilities
Are you using technology in creative, exploratory ways? Please contact us, we'd love to share your examples here.
Highlight
During the project Space and Place, artist Ann Henderson and students and teachers at Ballydown Primary School are documenting their work, and their creative process online. After a while, the journal site itself has evolved through feedback from the artists and children.
The first journal included work from all students however, it soon became apparent that the afterschool group needed their own space, as their ideas developed along their own path. View more images from their online journal: http://journal.kidsown.ie/spacegallery
The site displays images and text; over time it shows the development of their ideas. It also allows the group to communicate with the artist, Ann Henderson who is conducting the project from her studio on Rathlin Island. She does make periodic face-to-face visits, but every week the students meet with Ann online using video chat software provided by C2k and Marratech.
During this project the artists and children can explore the creative limitations and possibilities of video conferencing and working collaboratively and remotely.
