I said she didn’t owe me anything, except to make a powerful site. She wanted to at least give me a bottle of fine wine. I said a muffin would suffice. I think Merry didn’t want to be only a taker, but to also give something for the help. In that sense I probably should have let her give me something.

Merry Death reading Thomas Joiner’s, Myths about Suicide

Free with Purchase

The thing is, Merry’s a student at CSULB, and I’m faculty. Which means that just like any of the other 2,148 faculty members here, I’m happy to help any student. Sometimes students can get so buried in coursework and other university hoops, that they forget that the university is like a gigantic, physical Wikipedia. It doesn’t matter if you’re enrolled in someone’s class or not, you can always drop by a faculty member’s office hours and ask them questions.

As a working class university we have students balancing all kinds of responsibilities and work loads. Still, if a student jets on and off campus barely stopping long enough to attend class, they’re really only getting half of the experience and value they’re paying for. Even with 7.275 billion humans alive today, history still holds 15 dead humans for every living. And every one of those 101 billion ancestors, and most of the 7.275 alive today, have never had the privilege of a resource like CSULB and its wildly diverse 2,149 faculty members. I’m happy that Merry took advantage of a little of what CSULB has to offer today. And I can’t encourage other students enough: sieze the opportunities that your time at the university offers! Why pay tuition and then sit in the last row? 59 years ago Rosa Parks redefined freedom in America by demanding her right to a seat in the bus. Why don’t CSULB students demand a seat in the (often empty) front row of the classroom?

It’s about Community

Merry truly owes me nothing. But if I have a wish for her and other CSULB students, it’s to use the extraordinary tools of our time to create compelling communities. Facebook and many other online platforms where we are the product, not the customer (aka meat packing factories) have an undeniable stickiness and allure to them. They’re quite literally designed to trigger dopamine releases.

Older sites like Facebook have converted from “pages” to “streams,” and newer platforms like Instagram (owned by Facebook) were born as streams. There’s no doubt that streams are efficient ways to surf a lot of content. Got a 10-minute break from your barista job? With a few finger swipes of your iPhone 6 Plus you can scroll past hours of your friends lives with enough time left over to even like a few of them.

Streams are a nice way to quickly update yourself on a thousand little things. The are new communities and have interesting power that I don’t want to be too quick to ignore. But I still love Pages.

The Blogosphere Lives?

Pages, and The Blogosphere, sort of died, perhaps in part because tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg steamrolled over them on the way to paving his industrial parking lot, but also because we’ve been flailing wildly trying to deal with the problem of abundance. Compared to the problem that those earlier 101 billion humans had, and that so many of the 7.275 alive today still have: scarcity, abundance is a good problem to have. But just because it’s better than scarcity, doesn’t mean that abundance isn’t a real and serious problem.

Your Facebook stream lets you have it all. One bite of every single dish at the endless buffet. But is it a meal?

People like David Weinberger, Thomas Vander Wal, Marco Arment, Gina Trapani, Jason Snell, and Andy Baio have been calling for a sort of Blogosphere revival often focusing on fast and modest length posts.

I’d love to see Merry find other students and faculty here at CSULB, at the grad school she’ll be soon heading off to, and out in the rest of the real world, that she can create her own corner of The Blogosphere with. People who read each other’s posts. People who leave comments. People who write reply posts. (tangential as it may be, this is more-or-less a reply post to Merry’s 1st post)

If Merry can start creating that sort of community, it’d be a far bigger thank you than even the nicest bottle of wine. If she can use these tools to build a community, she’ll have done something extraordinary.

And BTW, my favorite tool for reading blogs is Feedly.

Students in conversation with artist Christine Hudson at the CSULB School of Art, Merlino Gallery. Hudson is in conversation just outside the gallery. Inside is her installation of 125,000 ceramic teeth.

WHY DO YOU WISH TO CONVERT THE COURSE TO A HYBRID OR FLIPPED FORMAT?

As the School of Art’s flagship General Education course reaching out to the entire campus community, Art 110 should be available in as many formats as students desire to experience it in. Given the way students live, work, and learn in 2014, I believe the hybrid version of the course may come to be our most popular version.

Students in 2014 are immersed in media. We acknowledged this fact when we took the books out of the 1st floor of the University Library and replaced them with a Starbucks and a computer lab. While sipping on her latte a CSULB student has 5 screens in front of her: her own device, plus 4 more on the Starbucks wall. Our course design must appreciate and leverage the deeply wired nature of our digital native students.

From teaching both 100% face-to-face and 100% online versions of this course I have come to believe that for many students the hybrid format will be ideal. While some students need the flexibility of 100% online, many feel a sense of loss at not spending time interacting with their peers. Equally, given the fast paced lives our students live, the speed with which they experience content, and the vast range of both content and experiences now at their fingertips, many students no longer seek the experience of 150 minutes a week of lecture.

Our students spend a lot of time online, yet they also deeply value face-to-face experience. By embracing the power of both formats we can offer education that matches the way students live their lives today, simultaneously “IRL & URL”.

REASONS CONVERTING THIS COURSE TO A HYBRID FORMAT WILL ENHANCE STUDENT SUCCESS

It makes sense for the School of Art to maximize enrollment in Art 110. Taught in UT-108 we have enough seats for 378 students. Yet as enrollment goes up, the course must become more generic to accommodate a wide range of learning styles, preparation, and experience. By maximizing online resources and student choice, a hybrid class could feature both large enrollment and large flexibility for individual students, something hard to achieve with traditional instruction.

The CSULB School of Art offers a truly unique resource: 5 student art galleries with new exhibitions each week of the semester. The CSULB SOA Art Gallery Complex is a completely unique facility where students can consider 60 different exhibitions by 60 different student artists in a single semester. I am not aware of another American institution where students can have such a rich experience. The SOA Gallery Complex and University Art Museum are ideal for face-to-face instruction. For the academic aspects of the course students can work with faculty created video talks and other online materials, choosing special interest topics, and working at a pace and time slot that best meets their personal situation.

Students interacting at the CSULB, School of Art, Gallery Complex.

Additional Materials

• Google Doc of this proposal
• Current Art110 Syllabus

The California State University at Long Beach (CSULB), College of The Arts (COTA), School of Art (SOA), Art Gallery Complex is a truly unique resource. Five student art galleries: Gatov Gallery West, Gatov Gallery East, Merlino Gallery, Dutzi Gallery & Werby Gallery present different MFA, BFA, and non-degree shows each week. We certainly need all these galleries since More students study Art & Design at CSULB than any other public university in America!

Exhibition Opportunities

The opportunity for an MFA student to not only be part of an MFA group exhibition, but to have the experience of producing a solo show is a powerful and valuable experience. That BFA students are afforded the same opportunity, and that both can also produce 1 or more non-degree shows during their time at the CSULB School of Art is priceless.

Viewing Opportunities

While the value of this exhibition experience for Art Students cannot be understated, it is also important to note what an incredible experience of art it offers both for Art Students, and for all students across the CSULB campus. I teach Introduction to the Visual Arts, a general education, non-major, mostly lower-division course. Each Thursday we spend our day at the School of Art, Art Gallery Complex viewing the new shows and talking with the artists. Over the course of our 15 week semester students have the opportunity to see 60 different shows and talk with 60 different artists. Culturally, aesthetically, and ideologically, the SOA student artists are as diverse as the myriad forms of media they employ in their work.

I’m not aware of anyplace else that students can see 60 different shows and talk with 60 different artists in a short, 4-month span. Southern California is home to many great Art Schools, but I’m not aware of any other school having 5 galleries. Southern California is home to many great Art Museums, but exhibitions there change every few months, not every week. 60 shows in a single semester is simply an extraordinary resource. And to have the artist right there for conversation makes it all-the-more unique and valuable an opportunity.

fit / tina linville

Thank You!

The School of Art includes 12 Programs: Art History, Art Education, and 10 Studio Programs: Ceramics, Drawing & Painting, Fiber, Graphic Design, Illustration & Animation, Metals & Jewelry, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture & 4D, and Wood. For myself, and for my 143 students this semester, I can’t say thank you enough to the School of Art, and to the many student-artists who are giving us a singular opportunity to experience Art not just as Art Appreciation textbooks or Art Museums chronicle the achievements of the masters across the ages, but as 60 different artists about the same age as my students and living in the same city see art, life, and culture here in the 21st century.

Personal Opportunity

You can count me among the many who have benefited from this remarkable resource. A decade ago as an MFA student in Sculpture / Intermedia I had the rare opportunity to use all 5 galleries and the Art Gallery Courtyard for my thesis exhibition. My thesis “Blue Shift,” was a chance to think about the nature of existence in our contemporary moment. The 5 Galleries plus Courtyard were a unique chance to create 5 installation works each with its own angle on corporeality, phenomenology, instantiation, individuality and uniqueness.

Thank you School of Art! Thank you College of the Arts! Thank you CSULB!

Jeanette Viveros

Photosynth of Jeanette Viveros installation in the SOA Merlino Gallery last week.

Art Gallery Courtyard

School of Art, Art Gallery Courtyard

Heather Anacker & Krista Feld

Gatov Gallery West & Gatov Gallery East installation by Heather Anacker & Krista Feld

Erynn Richardson / tina linville

Gatov Gallery West & Gatov Gallery East installations by Erynn Richardson / tina linville

Glenn Zucman / Blue Shift

Links

• CSULB
• College of The Arts
• School of Art

• Art Gallery Complex

• Jeanette Viveros / Instagram

• Heather Anacker / Flickr / Very Hungry Vegans
• Krista Feld / Blog
• Erynn Richardson / Erynn Richardson.com / Tumblr
• tina linville / tina linville studio.com / Blog
• Glenn Zucman / Mixed Reality Cabaret / ideas R.sexy

In July CSULB’s 7th president, Jane Conoley arrives. Here’s her hello video:

UC Riverside

It seems to be all about UC Riverside lately! When UCR Chancellor Tim White resigned in 2012 to become the new CSU Chancellor, Jane Conoley became the Interim UCR Chancellor, a position she has just resigned from to become the new CSULB President.

President Jane Conoley

Conoley holds a B.A. in Psychology from The College of New Rochelle and a Ph.D. in School Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She’s taught at numerous universities and written many books. Conoley will be the 1st female president in CSULB’s 65-year history, and she’ll be 1 of 4 female presidents in the 23-campus CSU system.

A few cool things about our CSU Chancellor:
1. He’s also a graduate of the CSU (Fresno State, 1970)
2. He makes vlogs (see below)
3. In his previous position as Chancellor of UC Riverside he was an “Undercover Boss”

Photo: Golden Gate Xpress

CSULB Online Education: 7 Questions

1. What’s your background with online courses and technology for higher ed in general?

Before this summer I had no experience with online. Almost. I took one Coursera course from Wharton. But I’d never designed for or taught online before. I’ve been eager to be a part of CSULB Online Education for some time now. As momentum for online has grown in our culture as a whole, and here at CSULB specifically, I’ve really been curious about the experience. When I heard about the CCPE initiative, I lept!

2. How did you find out about this opportunity? Were you excited to learn about it?

I think I heard about this CSULB Online Education project from the Provost’s weekly email. The Provost’s weekly message is farily new and I really appreciate it. It’s a simple, wonderful way to keep our large campus community a little bit more connected. Yes, I was very excited!

3. What course did you develop and teach?

Art110, Introduction to the Visual Arts. I first taught this course at CSULB in Fall 2005. This summer is the 29th time I’ve taught the course. Adding the 22 summer students, I’ve now worked with 3,537 CSULB students in Art110.

4. How did the experience compare with other online efforts you’ve undertaken?

There’s no comparison! Haha. It was my first, so there really is no comparison. I do think it was a good experience for myself and my 22 summer students.

5. How many students enrolled? Can you describe their reaction to the course?

1. I think they really liked the asynchronous flexibility. It fits both our busy lives and the way they experience knowledge today. And actually, it’s an interesting way to reinforce productive online activity for our students. When television was introduced people had utopian dreams of educating everyone. In spite of some great work, that issue is settled. Television is forever more an entertainment and commodity selling medium. But The Internet is still a contested space. There’s a lot of pressure to tame the net and make it purely a consumption pipeline like television, radio, and all media before it. But there are also crazy ideas like

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

With old media, someone could have watched television and really learned something. Equally someone could be reading a book and just wasting time. But our assumption, right an awful lot of the time, was that watching television was mostly “entertainment” and reading was mostly “knowledge.” Online there’s nothing like that distinction. If you see someone in front of a screen, you have no idea what kind of experience they’re having or how valuable it might be. So by using the tools of our time for education, we at least expose students to the possibility of learning and creativity online. I’m sure they’ll still watch plenty of cat videos. Still, we should get them used to The Net as a place to seek knowledge. If you use Facebook more minutes a day than Google, I think that’s a problem. If we can get them to use Google or Yahoo or Bing search more than they use Facebook, I think that’s powerful. If we can get them to visit Google Scholar occasionally, even better.

6. How would you describe the value of the Summer Online program?

As far as implementing the course goes, it was great to work with Ed and Debbie at CCPE. They helped in so many ways. Conceptually. Technically. Project management. It all added up to a big push to get a truly quality experience ready for the students.

For the students I think the value is both functional and experiential. The students love the flexibility of asynchronous learning. At least a few of my students traveled America and the globe this summer, and yet were able to complete a college course at the same time. One student vacationed in Taipei during the middle of the term. We were able to modify that week’s activity for him so he could produce a documentary project on his travels. Another CSULB student was at home in South China this summer, yet she was able to move closer to completing her CSULB degree while there. And these travels produce a wonderful diversity for all of us. Instead of visiting our own Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she was able to visit a local museum and explore the art, culture, and history of Canton.

I think the students love online for these very functional reasons. But I also think it’s a compelling experience in its own right. My face-to-face class at CSULB averages about 150 students. One semester it was 256. The student assistants and I have worked hard to try to engage all the students. To push the top students without leaving others behind. Even so, I do think the large class can be alienating for students. When you stand on the stage of UT-108 and look out on an ocean of students, you feel like it’s a big “them” out there. But it’s really not a “them,” it’s a lot of individuals who mostly don’t know each other. Two-thirds of my students describe themselves as introverts. I think the “big ocean of students” doesn’t always give them the richness you think you see from the stage, I think instead it can often be intimidating.

By contrast, online each student watches short videos you’ve produced and is able to have “eye contact” with you. We used a mobile app called “Tout” this summer. It makes 15-second videos. The students were able to use it to see and respond to each other. I think online has a real potential for student engagement.

We always talk about different types of student learners. Visual. Auditory. And I think face-to-face, online, hybrid, also should be in that vocabulary now. I think some students respond well to the asynchronous nature. I think others long for the regularity of TuTh 11-12:15. It’s great that we’re in a position to offer both. Knowledge is becoming more personal. And it should be!

7. Do you have related plans or hopes for the future?

I’d love to do something like this again next summer. What I’m planning for the fall F2F class is to take the materials we developed for summer and adapt them into a sort of hybrid or flipped course. Over the years I’ve tried lecture and activity in lots of combinations. I think we all see that the era of “the sage on the stage” is passing. But when I’ve tried going down to near zero lecture, the students just miss so much content. More activity is great, but with less historical and theoretical grounding their projects become more pedestrian. So I’m really excited about the “Flipped Classroom” where we can have short lecturettes on video and use class time for activities. It just makes so much sense.

In such a busy, fast paced world, the idea of managing to coordinate 150 people to all be in the same place at the same time so that one person can deliver an hour-long monologue to them is crazy! If we have the precious gift of being together with others I think it’s our obligation to have every participant be as active as possible in that time.

Thanks so much to CSULB CCPE for this fantastic opportunity. I hope we’ve served our summer students well, and I know it’s been a wonderful education for me on my pedagogical odyssey.

Related Materials
• Art110 Hall of Fame
• Newport Beach Public Library Expansion
• CSULB CCPE
• CSULB School of Art

Mixed Reality Cabaret author Erik Morales and I were sitting at the CSULB Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf this afternoon. He’s thinking of going to Defcon again this summer. It’s August 1-4 in Las Vegas. Erik’s grandmother loves to gamble. And it’ll be his birthday. I asked if he’d take his Alienware laptop to Defcon and he answered in just two words,

No way.

I thought about BarCampSD and Jun Axup and her tamper-proof seals. Or the last BCSD when she was annoyed with the Defcon guys for posting that they’d cracked her iPhone.

Cracking iPhones.
Picking locks.
Cracking safes.

And then I started to think about Richard Feynman. Feynman died in 1988, and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, so Feynman just missed playing in the sandbox that we’ve come to think of as every day life these days. Even so, thinking about some of his attributes:

Genius
Maverick
Prankster
Nobel Laureate
Rock Starr (geek version, anyway)
Rejected by Columbia University
Manhattan Project
Quantum Mechanics
Nanotechnology
Synaesthete
Bongo Player
Exhibited drawings under the pseudonym “Ofey”
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

I thought that given his genius, his rebellious spirit, his curiosity, and of course, his safe-cracking, that Feynman could have been the patron saint of Defcon.

And then our conversation turned to Erik’s evolving major. And how wouldn’t it be cool if instead of picking a major and then being told what list of classes to take and requirements to fulfill, if you could design your own curriculum. A kind of Mozilla Open Badge Framework where you’d cobble together some F2F experiences, maybe take a robotics class from Stanford online, a business class from Wharton online, and when you thought you’d explored and understood enough to warrant a piece of paper on top if it, you’d show up with your virtual box of badges to some University Registrar, maybe write them a check for $10,000 or something, let them evaluate your stuff, maybe be tested by the faculty, or “defend” your program, and eventually receive a certificate or a diploma.

That’s the best, most relevant future for education that I see ATM.

But IDK if the university or the faculty are ready for that. Oh. And by the way. I’m pretty sure most students don’t want it either. Students don’t want to be slaves, there’s plenty of hoops they’d just as soon not have to jump through, but the truth is, most students in these parts don’t really want freedom either:

Just tell us what to do.

I’ve thought that before. But I’ve sort of “blamed” the students for that. Today I realized that if you’ve spent the last 12 years of your life being told,

Here, memorize this stuff and then we’ll test how well you memorized what we told you to memorize.

then you’re probably not prepared for a “write your own curriculum” college experience. But I realized that just because students in 2013 aren’t ready for it, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the norm for students in 2023.

And then I suddenly remembered reading Steven Levy’s “biography” of Google, In The Plex. Today Marissa Mayer is President & CEO of Yahoo, but back when Levy was researching his book she was a long-time executive & spokesperson at Google, and she famously told Levy,

You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.

And then I made this Tout outside CBTL:

And then I wandered through the School of Art and ran into Krista Feld & January Smith who were forming some furniture:

January’s done with the “January Smith” identity and wanted thoughts on new identity explorations. I told them about “Curiosity vs Respect,” and Krista thought that “Obedience” was maybe a better word.

Yes.

Much better.

I thought about Stanley Milgram.
And Philip Zimbardo.
Then I got in my car to drive to Newport Beach to kayak and just happened to be at the exact chapter in the book on CD version of Lisa See’s 2005 book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan where they go through the excruciating details of foot binding.

OMG

Last week I read her 2007 book Peony in Love which featured excruciating footbinding scenes. This week the scenes in Peony in Love seem almost easy.

But of course, if your mother really loved you, it was her duty to break the bones in your feet, beat you, and pretty much torture the living crap out of you. If she didn’t, you were just a worthless girl who may as well have been drowned at birth. But if she did, then you could be a valuable commodity, fetching a high “bride price” when you were eventually sold off.

It’s not really fair to critique the culture of another time and place from your own cozy vantage point. Still. From the easy life of a Californian in the 21st century, the values on the compellingly written pages of See’s books are so many unrelenting slaps across the face of the world as I’d imagined it ought to be.

Richard Feynman was a genius.
And a maverick.
He won a Nobel prize.
And cracked safes.

It’d probably be misleading to make an analogy between Feynman and Italian prankster artists Eva & Franco Mattes. I’m sure they’re not quite geniuses in the way that he was. And I don’t think he was a prankster on their level. IDK. I do sort of think that if Eva & Franco were scientists, they wouldn’t be that sanctimonious Einstein or that self-important Hawking, they’d be the smartass… they’d be Feynman.

One of Feynman’s books was called, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Eva & Franco would never write that book. They might write The Fun of Making Shit Up. And boy did they have fun. The number of times “real” and “fake” reverse in the story of Darko Maver is remarkable. Bottom line: Darko Maver was a “fake” artist who had more powerful insights and critiques of art and culture than most “real” artists.

And maybe that’s the point.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and The Fun of Making Shit Up seem like pretty different books. But are they?

Both sort of say “assume nothing,” “test it for yourself,” “nothing is sacred,” “have your own, direct experience.” Whether you’re looking at something no one has ever looked at before, or something that’s been settled for ages, it doesn’t matter, still poke at it, prod it, take it apart, break it, understand it.

The United States hasn’t done so much manufacturing for a long time now. Yet we may still be the most creative country on earth. If we are, I don’t think it’s because of “American Exceptionalism” or some other self-centered, self-righteous “God likes us better” egotism, I think it’s because of our diversity. The very people that the proponents of American Exceptionalism don’t want to let in this country, are the reason we are diverse and creative and think different and are exceptional and are, perhaps, great.

I love the scene in Inception where Cobb asks Ariadne to draw mazes. She’s just walking between architecture classes at a Paris university when her favorite professor says “Mr. Cobb has a job offer for you.” He’s about to offer her money and creative opportunity beyond her wildest dreams, but first she has to pass a test. He gives her graph paper and asks her to draw mazes. They’re not good enough. Finally in frustration she rejects the graph paper he’s provided and uses the cardboard backing of the pad instead. And then, free of the tyranny of the lines, she impresses Cobb and lands the job.

In that moment of frustration she invents the solution, the “revenge of color” that Yves Klein dreamt of in his storyboard for The War Between Line and Color: she invents “coloring outside the lines.”

Perhaps it’s not that hard to color outside the lines we see.

But what about the lines we don’t see?

How do you color outside the lines of a zone of immaterial sensibility?

A few years back the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hired a bunch of the world’s greatest architecture firms. They paid them a bunch of money for proposals for a massive redesign. They had a number of conditions, a number of “rules” for the design. Every architect who submitted a design proposal complied with the rules they were given. Except one: Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas just chose to ignore the rules he was given. He didn’t do what LACMA asked. He submitted a design that didn’t meet the terms that LACMA had stipulated. Oh, and his design was also brilliant.

After much review it came time for LACMA to pick a winner… they picked Koolhaas’ design.

Janet Cardiff makes shit up too. She creates alternative, site-specific audio tours that guide you into a mysterious narrative world of time and place and people and possibility. Who gives a crap if it’s true, it’s truth! I think sometimes we think

fact = truth
and
fiction = fake

But I think it’s the opposite. My copy of

Windows 7 User’s Manual
is filled with “facts,”
but it doesn’t contain any important “truths” at all.

My copy of

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
isn’t factual, it’s just a bunch of shit that Shakespeare made up.
But it’s about the most powerful human truth I know of.

C O N C L U S I O N S
1. Your voice is the most powerful thing you’ll ever own. Or, at least it could be, if you practice using it.
2. Richard Feynman should be the patron saint of Defcon.
3. If you really care about discovering powerful truths, you’re going to have to make a lot of shit up to get there.
4. Knowledge is Power: we need more citizen journalists.
5. Knowledge is Power: what if we worried less about Obedience and more about Curiosity?

Can we “teach creativity”? IDK. But I’m pretty sure we can teach… or promote… or encourage… or inspire… Curiosity…

R U L E S
obviously, to be broken as desired
1. Commit an act of curiosity every day.
2. Commit an act of journalism every day by telling the world what you discovered in #1.
3. Repeat while breathing.

L i n k s
• Mad Art Lab / Feynman Day
• Krista Feld / MRC
• January Smith / MRC
• Erik Morales / Instagram
• Defcon.org
• Utopia in Four Movements.com
• Koyaanisqatsi / Vimeo
• Cardiff / Miller.com
• Rem Koolhaas / OMA: LACMA Extension, 2001
• Darko Maver / Rhizome
• Eva & Franco Mattes / 0100101110101101.org

Good Job!

Four years. You’re probably afraid to even count how many thousands of hours and thousands of dollars. You’ve done the work. You’ve learned. You’ve achieved. You’ve shown your work. Finally the day comes: you put on a robe, sit in the campus mall with your classmates, and listen to speeches as thousands of family and friends look on. And then it happens: your name is called, you walk onto the stage, the president shakes your hand…

Sort of…

Unfortunately as you walk off the stage we Google your name and discover that you don’t have half the “Internet Resume” as some guy who never even went to college.

After all that work, Did you forget to tell The Internet?

There’s a world of curators, collectors, and ordinary citizens who might be interested in your work. Don’t keep it a secret.

SEO Artists’ Portfolios

In this workshop we’ll look at the current search results for your name, your online presence, start or develop your website, and work toward a richer, higher ranking set of search results for your name.

Free Workshop
Leader: Glenn Zucman
Time: 10a – 1p Friday May 3
Place: FA4-108A, School of Art, CSULB
Bring: Your Laptop & power cord

• More Info: mixedreality.me/tag/artists-portfolio
• Free Registration: Eventbrite

People come to The University for many reasons: for some it’s a quest for knowledge, for others it’s just the thing you do after high school, and for many, it’s 4 or so years to prepare for a hopefully satisfying and fulfilling career. In those 4 years you’ll take about 40 classes. Some will be life changing. Some, not so much. But hopefully in all of them you’ll do good work and learn something. Just as a “bad film” can still have that one memorable supporting actor who really affected you, so even in a not-so-memorable class, you might write one really great paper.

As artists, whether we make objects like paintings and sculptures, or ephemeral works like performance and installation that we document through photo/video/text, we might be more likely than many students to preserve and document our work. But where can it be seen? In a gallery for a few weeks every year or so? And what do we do with that memorable paper, throw it away after we see the grade?

Every May thousands of students graduate from CSULB. Their name is called, they walk onto a stage in the middle of the mall, and President Alexander shakes their hand. But what happens after President Alexander shakes your hand? If I was sitting on the steps where you exit the stage with my laptop, and Googled your name 5 seconds after President Alexander shakes your hand, what would come up in the search results? A long, impressive “Search Result Resume” that shows me, and anyone else who wants to know, just how busy you’ve been for the last 4 years and how much you’ve accomplished?

Or almost nothing?

Many of you care a lot about what your friends post on Facebook, and you might ask them to take down a photo or video if you think it makes you look bad. Shouldn’t you care at least as much about your online “resume” as you do about your online “yearbook?”

I believe a great 4-year degree should include 3 things:
1. A head full of knowledge & ability
2. A handshake from The President & a piece of paper (“diploma”)
3. An awesome “resume” when I search on your name

If you don’t have #3, how are #1 & #2 going to help you start building your career? I believe if you get that handshake and piece of paper, without also having #3, then in represents a failure by the university, a failure by the faculty, and a failure by you. Since I don’t like failure, let’s get started on building great search results for you…

Search Engine Results

We know in 2013 when you want to show your art in a gallery, when you apply for a job, when you run for office in student government, when you want to join a club or go on a date, someone is going to “Google you.” Since we know this is going to happen, we should know what they’re going to find, and we should work to make sure they find a bounty of compelling work there.

We sometimes think it’s vain to “Google yourself,” but it’s not. Is it vain to brush your teeth? Is it vain to look look in the mirror before you leave your house for the office? Is it vain to read your resume before you hand it to someone? It’s your responsibility to know what people will find when they look for your name on search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google.

When you do search your name, don’t worry too much about how many results it claims to find, 1,000 or 1,000,000 or whatever. If your first name is “Paris” or your last name is “Hilton” or anything like that, the number of results could be very different. And most peeps never look past Page One of the results anyway, so it’s not so important that there’s 80,000 results for your name, what is important is that the stuff on page 1 is actually about you and that it’s strong work.

If Page One mostly isn’t about you, there are a few possible reasons:
1. There’s almost nothing about you online.
2. You have a more common or popular name like “Paris Hilton” and that other person is taking up all the space.
3. There is content about you online, but it’s not tagged well or is somehow hard to find.

Privacy?

There are many different players in our 21st century media culture, and for different reasons, many of them would love for you to be invisible online. Your parents or grandparents might fear The Internet because they don’t really understand it, and they’d like you to be invisible because they think you’ll be safer that way. Old media would love for you to be invisible because they don’t believe in a 21st century many-to-many Internet, they liked the old 20th century one-to-many model where they chose what music, games, movies, and books were published and you just paid your money and consumed their product.

I certainly don’t believe that everything in your life must be public. It’s your right to have all the privacy you want. But I do believe that most people are better served by being more public. And I certainly do believe that if you’re an artist, or business marketer, or nurse, or marine biologist, or any of the other 65 majors that I regularly come in contact with at CSULB, that you are better served by showing the strong work you’ve been doing to an online audience.

So if you do have a “Paris Hilton” name, it’s not “yay, I can hide,” it’s “grrr, they’re standing in my frame!” If too many others are “polluting” your search results, you might think about using a middle name or a nickname on all your online projects. You should think about some way that feels comfortable and right for you, to have a distinct online presence.

SEO Artists’ Portfolios

I actually mean a few different things by the term “SEO Artists’ Portfolios.” I mean a specific website that you control. I also mean all the search results that Bing, Yahoo, or Google produce for your name, which you do not control, but which you can influence. You might also think about how you fare when someone searches not for your name, but a topic, like “Contemporary Painter Los Angeles” or “Accountant CSULB” or “Documentary Cinematographer.” Being on Page One of a search like that could be really challenging, but what a great resource if you could get there!

Isn’t LinkedIn Enough?

You might know that as Facebook is the network “for friends,” that LinkedIn is the network “for professional contacts.” So, isn’t being on LinkedIn enough? Or Behance? Or Deviant Art? Some would say yes. I say no. For sure you should spend some time developing a strong profile on LinkedIn and other professional sites in your field, like Behance. But all of these sites, and Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and on and on, they’re all somebody else’s property.

If you were driving around LA or Long Beach and saw a lot with nothing on it, would you bring a truck full of lumber and start building a house there? It might be a nice house you built, but what do you tell your kids when they wake up one morning and someone’s deleted your house? If you read your Terms Of Service – you know that thing that nobody reads but that you hear is creepy because this or that website wants to steal ownership of all of your stuff? Yeah, forget that red herring, what actually should disturb you in the TOS is that they reserve the right to cancel your account at any time for no reason, and they also reserve the right to axe the whole service at anytime with no notice.

Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and others are the New Town Square and it’s essential for you to develop a strong presence there. But I believe you should also have a little piece of land that is your own. Buying the domain name “me.com” isn’t vain at all, and it’s way more useful than buying a personalized license plate for your car. If you’re the tech type, you can build your own site. You could use HTML/CSS, or let a program like Dreamweaver do it for you, or you could assemble it with powerful tools like Drupal or Joomla. But for most mere mortals I think the best website is a Blog or a Wiki.

In many ways I like the organizational structure of a wiki better for a thing like a portfolio, and there are zillions of great wikis out there, besides just the one ultra-famous wiki that everybody uses every day. Still, in my experience, blogs seem to develop more exposure and connection potential beyond the core community of users. And these days blogs are really Content Management Systems (CMS). You can use “a blog” “to blog” if you want to, but you don’t have to, it can simply be your portfolio site.

And while you don’t have to blog, I’d really encourage you to. You don’t have to write The Great American Novel, in fact you shouldn’t, a blog post can be a short, quick, and easy piece. Just a quick thought. Yes it could also be more substantive. I think if you do post, that you’ll find over time you might develop a following, and whether you do or not, you will develop your own thinking about your field and your work, and you’ll find yourself much better able to articulate your ideas when you chat with friends and colleagues, apply for a job, or want to communicate in any other way.

Platforms

Probably the 3 most popular platforms today are WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. Students tend to be most familiar with Tumblr, Blogger less so, and WordPress probably not at all. They’re all great platforms to present your work. Personally, I find WordPress to be the strongest. WordPress comes in 2 flavors, the free, hosted, “WordPress.COM” and the self-hosted “WordPress.ORG”. For many peeps the advanced options of the self hosted .org option are the best. But if you’re just getting started, the no or very low cost of .com (it’s free forever, but you might want to pay $20 or so /year for an optional “me.com” domain name) and the simplicity of it are probably the best start. And if you ever want more flexibility you can always move your WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted site.

Analytics

There are many ways to track visits to your site. Hosted sites like Wikispaces or WordPress.com offer their own “analytics,” and on other sites like WordPress.org or Tumblr you can run Google Analytics or other analytics tools. Don’t get depressed if you don’t get many visits. Although if you do use the New Town Square of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, to let your contacts know when you’ve posted new work, you will start to get some “Studio Visits” from those peeps in the “Town Square.”

Sometimes you don’t need a lot of traffic to your site. Maybe you just want that one museum curator or human resources person to see it and be impressed. So sometimes the traffic of One Visit, can make all the difference. Other times you might want a less specific, but larger general audience to be able to know about your work. Whatever your interests, Tracking analytics can let you know how your online presence evolves over time. Just as “Googling yourself” is a good thing, not a bad thing, so tracking your visitors doesn’t have to be vanity, but simply being informed and aware.

Next Steps

And then you design that website! The site for a photographer probably wants to look pretty different from the site for a journalist, but whatever you do, your site should make a compelling presentation of your work, your professionalism, and your sensibility. The vibes from a Graffiti Writer’s website and a Biologist’s website might be pretty different, but both want a site that says, “I’m the real thing.”

haha, 2,000 words and I haven’t talked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) yet! I guess Design and SEO will have to wait for future posts, but if you think about the ideas in this post, you’ll already be creating a site that’s pretty SEO friendly!

Links

Even though I’m saving the “SEO Stuff” for “next time,” I have to give you one huge tip before we leave for now: Search Engines LOVE Links! Links are a Search Engine’s life blood. They love it when you link to other sites, and they really love it when other sites link to you. With over 35 million Twitter followers Lady Gaga was the world’s #1 Twitter user. Right up until Mr. Bieber reached 37 million. (Katy Perry is #3, Barack Obama is #4, and the other Justin is #10) If either of the Justins put a link from their website to yours… Google would be impressed!

kk, neither Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, nor The President are likely to ever link to you. But if you “trade links” with all your peers here at The Beach, you’ll be both improving your search rankings, and building an informal community of people you respect.

Post… link… repeat!
 

R E S O U R C E S
• wordpress.com
• WordPress Hosting: BlueHost – pretty good hosting for ridiculously low prices
• WordPress Hosting: WP Engine – $29/month or $290/year is a lot for most college students, but their servers are fast & secure and $300 really isn’t a lot if you care about your portfolio
• Blogger
• Tumblr
• Wikispaces
• Wikis by WetPaint
• PB Works (formerly PB Wiki)
• MediaWiki
 

I M A G E . C R E D I T S
• Redefine Online Magazine
• Fancy Pants Design Ltd.
• Cargo Collective
• Theme Squirrel
• 101 Best Websites
• Main Layout

In this slide from Chris Mattia’s keynote talk he asks if we should still grade papers with a red pen, or typed comments that are much more legible but time consuming, or use voice annotation technology to mark as we read. I absolutely believe in the importance of compelling writing, and as a reader for our Writing Proficiency Exam I know that out students are not all excellent, still, as a reader I have some small idea of the number of hours academics across the land spend reading and marking up assigned writing. It’s a staggering number of hours.

Out in the blogosphere peeps write what’s compelling to them, and others do or don’t respond to it. I wonder if networked interaction space might not be a more efficient and engaging space to develop writing skills. You’ll never get the precise grammar and punctuation corrections an English professor can give you, but presumably Shakespeare, Hemingway, and various others somehow developed adequate skills without the benefit of a mentor’s red pen. Is there a space where we free students of “assigned” writing and faculty of endless reading, and instead empower learners to cast their words out to the world and hone their skills through a combination of reading and the less technical feedback of other interested peeps?

Online, MOOCs & Isolation

In his talk Online 2.0: The Future of Online Learning, Peter Campbell from Blackboard gave us his view of the good and bad news for The University vis-a-vis MOOCs.
THE BAD NEWS: If your University courses aren’t at least as compelling as a free MOOC, you’re really in trouble!
THE GOOD NEWS: Campbell doesn’t believe that MOOCs can get to “2.0.” He sees their massiveness as a limiting factor for engagement and that many of the weaknesses of MOOCs are real strengths of The University.

I’m sure he’s part right. In my own MOOC student experience it’s true that I didn’t have email correspondence with the instructor. But I did “see” him twice a week in face-to-face videos where he not only lectured but also commented on student input on the course forums and wiki. And on those forums and that wiki there was as much peer interaction as you wanted. I was impressed by how active the forums were and how quickly posts got voted up or refined.

Another interesting idea Campbell expressed was the feeling of Isolation that online courses can produce. I’m thinking a lot about these issues as I prepare to teach my first 100% online course this summer. I do believe that short lecture videos, viewed at the time and place of the student’s choosing, may well be more engaging than sleeping in my giant 378-seat F2F lecture hall. Campbell suggested that while students appreciate the asynchronous options for viewing, testing, and projects, that

For a significant number of students the asynchronous experience is not enough.

I was planning to make the course 100% asynchronous, as I didn’t want anyone to feel that if they missed even an optional chat that they were somehow getting less out of the experience. Perhaps I can slice Office Hours up to a range of days / times and try Google Hangouts with students. For whoever wants it that’d certainly offer synchronous, live video interaction with myself and their peers. I think Google Hangouts can accomodate 10 video streams, and more users not on video. 10 should be plenty for us!

Collaborative Learning

I’ve been listening to podcasts from The Berkman Center for Internet and Society for years now. I owe Charlie Nesson a debt I’ll never be able to repay in a single lifetime. Just as some people have spent so many hours with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry in their living rooms that they start to feel they know them, so I have spent so many hours driving in my car with Johathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig I almost start to feel I know them.

Education in our century is one of many ideas explored at Berkman. From there and other sources I’ve realized that the era of The Sage on the Stage, if that mode of learning was ever really efficient, is now flowing down to its nadir. But I’ve also found that, at least in a large freshman lecture course, when you lecture less, the students do miss out on so much context, and their project work regresses toward the predictable and the banal.

So I was exited to visit CSULB’s AS-244, the Collaborative Learning Classroom and hear Leslie Kennedy’s talk on this one “experimental” room on campus. The most persuasive information Kennedy offered was not how engaging or immersive or interactive the room was, but that it wouldn’t be the one room for long:
• September 2013: 4 Collaborative Classrooms at CSULB
• September 2014: 34 Collaborative Classrooms at CSULB

If that isn’t the handwriting on the dry-erase wall, well… And indeed the room is engaging. I spent a semester teaching in Fullerton’s All the Arts for All the Kids program, visiting many 1st through 6th grade classrooms, and the organization of this space reminded me of nothing so much as a 2nd grade classroom in Fullerton. Of course education has never been an all-lecture affair, The Arts have always featured “Studio” classes, and The Sciences have always featured “Lab” classes. And even if an English class is in a traditional classroom, those old wooden desks are very quickly turned to form “collaborative” reading and discussion groups.

On another level, I sometimes wonder why we focus on classrooms at all: are we focused on learning? Or day care? Why is it a special “field trip” to leave the classroom and go out to the tide pools? Shouldn’t the whole course be at the tide pools and it’s a special day when we meet at a classroom to discuss our experiences?

Open Space Discussions

All the talks I was able to attend were good, and as is so often the case, the impromptu conversations in the hallways and between sessions were even better. For the last hour of the conference these informal conversations were presented formally… or informally formal… in Open Space Discussions. We discussed a diverse set of interesting topics, and perhaps even more than the useful information, ideas, and opinions, it was just a pleasure to see minds at work.

Even though being on a university campus is such an extraordinary privilege, like any other career it still has plenty of day-to-day pressures and frustrations. It’s inspiring to step away from that and remember just how many smart and motivated students, staff, and faculty there are on the 23 campuses of this largest-in-America University system.

• My #CATS2013 Tout stream
• Instagram / #cats2013
• CATS 2013 – Facing the Future

I’ve taught Art110 at CSULB for 8 years now, and this is my 28th section of the course. Including this semester, I’ve had a total of 3,515 students in Art110 at CSULB.

I’m very excited to be developing this new online version of the course. Online media has terraformed first the newspaper, next the library, and now the university. With newspapers we see that journalism is stronger than ever even though revenue is in turmoil. The New York Times with its print and online editions has today more readers than at any previous time in its history, so the revenue concerns are real, but journalism and readership are strong. I would argue that new media isn’t the death of journalism, but the golden age. The transformation of libraries is less far along and I think they are, in many ways, in an identity crisis at the moment. I also see tremendous support for the institution of the library. We may not know what it is to become, but we know that we value it and want to see it thrive in our new 21st century environment.

As the university embraces the media of our time change is inevitable. We have many concerns today, from 40 years of astronomical cost inflation, to face-to-face education becoming a luxury only for the elite, and many others. Yet I don’t see the growth of online as the “death” of face-to-face education, rather, like a modern-day Clement Greenberg, I see online helping face-to-face discover what it does best and most fundamentally. I believe the 21st century will be a golden age for all education: face-to-face, online, and hybrid. I’m not certain our students of today want it, but I do hope that over time we will also examine credentialing itself, and that tools like the Mozilla Open Badge Framework will allow learners to take a greater role in the development of their personal trajectories through the knowledge century.

I M A G E S :
• Access Distance Learning
• Dallas Baptist University
• University of Colorado, Boulder, Online Courses