Week 14

·     How can we help students develop their visual lexicons?

We can help students develop their visual lexicons by giving them ample opportunities (both inside and outside of the classroom) to explore a wide variety of images relevant to the 21st century. Their lexicons should not only include art history and more traditional art curriculum, but also elements of our visual culture, design, and 

creative endeavors happening around the world.

·     In what ways are social bookmarking sites (for both links & images) beneficial to the artistic thinking and research process?

I find social bookmarking sites extremely beneficial to the artistic thinking and research process. We are actually using pinterest in my sculpture class this semester to find images of contemporary sculptors' work and to share them with our classmates. This application allows for collaboration and sharing. Also, I am a big advocate of pinterest because I bookmark a wide variety of pieces of inspiration and organize them by category (or boards). I find it extremely important to streamline this process, it can be frustrating when you have to use multiple applications that do not correlate well. 

·     What strategies do artists use for keeping track of their inspiration?  How can technology help this process run more smoothly?

Artists use physical notebooks, artist journals, inspiration wires, magazine clippings, online accounts, phones, cameras and more to keep track of their inspiration. I also like to carry a pocket notebook to jot down or sketch anything that inspires me. Like I mentioned earlier, I find these strategies to be most useful when my inspiration is recorded in just a few places, as it seems that things get lost when they are scribbled onto loose scraps of paper.

·   How might mind mapping and other visual thinking strategies impact the breadth and context of a student’s learning of a given subject?

I think mind mapping and other visual thinking strategies help students to discover possibilities they may not have arrived at had they just visualized something in their head. Seeing words and connections on paper can be very helpful in organizing your thoughts and one of the most key pieces to learning: making connections.

What artistic thinking and research technologies are most beneficial to your studio environment and/or art classroom?

I used Inkflow for the Intertext exercise and discovered something incredibly useful about the application. I love the idea of being able to translate hand drawing to a digital medium. This is something I have wanted to learn how to do for a long time and I think that it could be of great use for a variety of projects. The application allows you to draw directly on the surface of the ipad to create an image or a mind map, or take a picture of notes and then convert them to a vector image. This task can be very time consuming when it must be done manually in photoshop. 

I also found the symbaloo application to be a great resource for an art classroom homepage, however I wish that it worked more seamlessly with social media. It appears that it is designed more for RSS feeds, but I think that the inclusion of pinterest and art blogs could be very beneficial as well.