807 images and counting . . . http://flickr.com/photos/tags/christo/
This contemporaneous flickr image homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic whimsy reminds me of two other stunning collective “knowledge building” events - both from Wikipedia (The Gates also has a Wikipedia entry). On March 11, 2004 I searched Wikipedia for “madrid bombings” and saw a single paragraph entry. As the day progressed, and then the weeks, the entry ballooned into many pages that contextualized the bombings with information about al-Qaida, ETA, 9/11, the history of the Moors in Spain, national and international political reactions, and on and on. It was amazing, actually, quite moving to see these pages evolve so quickly and deeply in such a telescoped time frame. I witnessed the same process beginning October 8, 2004 with Jacques Derrida’s death. What began as a simple 2 paragraph post developed instantly into a major appreciation of his life and work and influence. Both instances, and now flickr’s collective The Gates photos (and probably the Wikipedia entry for The Gates as well) were/are views onto the potency and efficiency of collaborative tasking. Models for the classroom.
I know of relatively few descriptions of innovative blended teaching coming from Art & Design programs. Examples may exist, but they are dwarfed by the case histories emerging from Liberal Arts or Business School courses. And then I stumbled upon this:
http://research.the-bac.edu/sva/index.htm - Sally Levine and Warren Wake’s 2000 presentation to the National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. They titled their presentation, Education of Artists, Hybrid Teaching: Design Studios in Virtual Space, and delivered it on October 20, 2000 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City – about 5 blocks away from where I live.
They begin their paper with an appreciation of hybrid teaching and an acknowledgement that it is poised to become the standard for future college education - the classroom remaining, however, the strategic site for teaching and learning. (Justifying this statement, they pull a 1998 quote from Saskia Sassen, the University of Chicago Professor of Sociology and globalization theorist: “there is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully (digitized industry,” that even “sectors that are highly digitized require strategic sites.”)
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