Ten Things

In the old days art teachers used slide projectors. The students would sit in the dark while the teacher pushed the buttons on the slide projector, showing pre-arranged slides and talking about the images--which were bigger than life. Under these conditions you couldn't tell what was fact and what was fiction. I think that it was fiction, and that's why everyone stayed put. It was also because you weren't allowed to leave the room. That's how art was taught in the old days.

Over the twenty years I taught, I watched thousands of students watching millions of slides this way. When multimedia shows, with fancy programmable slide projectors, fades, dissolves, etc. came in, the art shows began to resemble film. As art teachers, we were sort of walking backward into the future. When video became practical, then we turned around (some of us, anyway) and faced the future.

We -- the students and I -- learned ten things in this period, and to live in the present (which was the future I faced in 1985) I organized these ten things into clusters I call "Islands of Domains of Expertise" and made them the fictional counterparts to curriculum design. Today I made an ATC to show how the two blend together--a slide show depicting the island of Video.

In the game, Emeralda, you move from one island domain to the next--if you are good enough! BTW, you can go to my blogs written on each of the ten islands and see summaries of my essays.