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.

There are a lot of us to move between the galleries, but hopefully it’s not too overwhelming and we’re still able to have nice conversations with you all.

Below is a list of links where you can see the blog posts the students have made about your work. If you come across an interesting write-up, feel free to click in the comment box at the bottom of the post and share your feedback with the student-author. Hopefully there won’t be anything inaccurate, but if you do find any corrections or have anything to add, by all means, let the students know.

And for any SOA artists who don’t have a website yet, if you see an Art110 student site you really like, you can always leave a comment and see if they’d like to get a site up and running for you!

Artists

Wk1 January 19 – 23

MeghanSmythe
BriannaAllen
KarinaCunningham
ChelseaMcintyre

Wk2 January 26 – 30

PatriciaAnderson
CynthiaLujan and FranciscoPalomares
MyleneRaiche
VanessaOrtiz
OscarMendoza and RominaDelCastillo

Wk3 February 2 – 6

CSULBmetals
JenniferHipolite
AllisonAnderson
JazminUrrea
NicholasGaby

Wk4 February 9 – 13

RavenSherman
ITanWong
NidiaMorales
NataliGuerraPineda
AlyssaBierce

Wk5 February 16 – 20

CSULBdrawingPainting
AnnieChang and CourtneyHeiser
ScottBurns
BryanLenorud
CandaceWakefield

Wk6 February 23 – 27

CSULBphotoClub
ChristopherHernandez
MarcusThibodeau
AnnetteHeully and VavVavrek
CSULBmetals

Wk7 March 2 – 6

JustinSmith and MichaelRollins
CathyHsiao and EricaFojtik and SarahChu
ArezooBharthania and AlanaMarcelletti

Wk8 March 9 – 13

CSULBmfa
NoraAyala
CSULBink13
JamesReal

Wk9 March 16 – 20

DonTinling
JesseSo
KiyomiFukui and JenniferChen
MarkDitchkus
CharlesKessler

Wk10 March 23 – 27

AudraGraziano
EricaFojtik
EstebanRamirez
JennaKurtz
JamesHaag

Wk11 April 6 – 10

DebbieCarlson
DaneKlingaman
LuisMacias
RileyHansler
MichaelNannery

Wk12 April 13 – 17

CSULBprintmaking
DakotaGracey
DarleneCasco
CSULBwood

Wk13 April 20 – 24

CSULBillustration
RonaldPagenkopp

Wk14 April 27 – May 1

ChelseaMosher
ReneeChartier
SarahAlonzo
KharaCloutier
TavaTedesco

Wk15 May 4 – 8

CSULBdrawingPainting
CSULBphotography

Courtney Heiser discussing her work with Art110 students.

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

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

I know you posted that whole step-by-step thing on the website, but the truth is I didn’t read it, so can you tell me what we’re doing today?

I did. Mary and her classmates made castings of their hands or feet. And then maybe 20 or so minutes later another batch of students arrived at the beach. They walked over to me and asked what they should do and I gestured over to Mary and replied,

See Mary, she’s your instructor today.

Mary never asked what I was talking about. Or complained that it was a hassle. Or worried that she didn’t really know what she was doing. She just taught the class. For the rest of the day. Students came, did projects, left. Mary stayed the whole day and helped everyone. She explained the concepts and techniques, and then gave them a hand executing the work. To this day she and I have never actually said a word about her helping out or teaching peeps plaster casting. It was just an offhand, probably smartass statement from me. I don’t know what I expected, probably nothing, but Mary took the moment and owned it. Like Sean Penn or Meryl Streep inhabiting a persona, she became the instructor.

Oh, and I think more peeps got amazing results today than when the guy who has the MFA in Sculpture teaches them how to do it! She thinks it might be her technique of putting 4 inches or so of damp sand at the bottom of the hole you dig so that your fingers or toes can “sink in” instead of trying to pour damp sand around all that fine detail. Whatever it was, no kidding, best results ever!

Before today Mary had never done anything with plaster in her life. In addition to an obvious willingness to be present in whatever moment she finds herself in, she also brings a lifetime of love and experience with the ocean, water, and so many living things. From her time on the CSULB Crew, to her study of whaling today, to her design of whale watching expeditions, I think she just has such an intuitive understanding of the ocean, the shore, organic life, and sculptural space that she’s able to help her students produce great work. Anyway, we’re very lucky to have her.

To everyone I got to see at the Seal Beach Pier on Thursday, thanks so much for coming down, it was awesome to spend a little time with you guys. And to everyone else doing this Challenge, have a great time at whatever beach and whatever day you go! And thanks again to our guest instructor Mary Hanson – you were totally awesome!

• Plaster Casting Challenge Details
• Flickr Group / Student Plaster Pix
• Flickr / Glenn’s Pix from Plaster Casting @Seal Beach Pier

Mary Hanson with students & plaster castings of their hands.