My choice of tool to conduct a distance learning experiment became a Web Site. My intention was to create an interactive site, where students could access lessons, a teacher, and student input to increase skills, competency, and confidence in an area of arts. My audience is a range of ages, from 8th grade to college age and beyond. The main commonality among the audience is their desire to learn online and their desire to learn an art form. While I believe the students of my site can be school-aged persons, I think more of them will be college – aged adults or those adults who are out of school and would like to experiment with learning something new at little or no cost.
My goal was to create a learning community with the resources available to me. I thought that I would teach painting through this experiment, but soon I realized that it would be one of the most difficult subjects, due to the fact that the resolution of pictures and video may adversely affect the look of brush strokes and other elements of painting. I decided instead to teach the craft of knitting, a popular fiber art form. Many individuals I know are interested in learning this traditional craft, and it seemed that it would lend itself well to steaming video instruction.
I am an intermediate knitter, so while I was able to identify the important structure required to teach the basics of the craft, I needed to employ the help of a friend to answer some of the more advanced technical questions that I was sure I would receive from students. I like the idea of sharing my fiber projects with a group of other learners so that I can receive appropriate feedback.
I originally envisioned building a site that has some lessons in many formats (such as video, photo, and mp3) and also has a place for collaboration, like a Blog or a forum area. I was hoping that the forum area would be the place where members post photos and questions of their projects. The outcome of this project changed slightly. I found that in the amount of time that I had to build this teaching tool, it was prudent to use video to start out with for the lessons. While I plan to add other forms of media to convey knitting principals, video remains the most efficient way to communicate the basics of the craft. I also found that building a multi-user Blog interface, like WordPress, into my site was extremely nerve-racking. I wanted users to be able to come to my site to “join” the community and start their own Blogs. For this reason I spent hours researching what I would need, and looking for the hosting company that would offer it to me: MySQL, Apache modules, PHP support, and enough space, bandwidth and customer service at a decent price. After doing my best to install, troubleshoot and communicate with the customer service team at Hostgator through Chat and telephone for days on end, I had to re-evaluate what I was truly capable of building in the remaining weeks before December 15th. I ended up installing a free program from Wikimedia. This involved me building a MySQL database and changing a few lines of code in some files on my server, among other things. It is the same software that Wikipedia is built on. While it required a lot of work to get it to not look like Wikipedia, it was something I was able to manage. This wiki allows me to facilitate partnership in learning among the students that participate in my experiment.
The next challenging part of my experiment remains the participation aspect of it. How will I get students to join? While I have convinced my co-workers to take part in joining the learning community, my site requires many more participants to judge its educational value. I have yet to discover if an online classroom can enhance traditional, because I haven’t had enough involvement and membership. I wanted to see if learning could be facilitated through my site by providing more guidance, enthusiasm, and student commitment than a television show or how-to book. I am also still interested in finding out how successful a completely online visual arts classroom model can be. I think it is possible to provide great teaching/coaching/and skill building in an online format.
I enjoyed building this site from scratch. I originally thought that I would use a well-designed site template and modify it so that it fit my project design just right. This was also an area where I wasted much time and effort. After finding that I could not modify someone else’s XHTML code without creating my own bugs, I ended up designing my own site from a blank page using an enormous amount of AP Div’s. Some things about it that I could see improvement are it’s design, depth of lessons and lesson format, amount of pattern archives/small project directions available, and a more authentic way to display “featured” students and teachers.
I ended up providing more beginning lessons (5) than intermediate and advanced (2 each). These lessons do not of course cover the entire gamut of skills to become an expert knitter, but they do provide a good foundation for an e-learner to continue to build talent. It was my intent that following each lesson, students would sign on to post comments and share their assignments. I began the discussion by posting my own work and asking for feedback. Unfortunately this did not generate as much participation as I’d hoped, but I do believe if I keep this project going, I will prove the validity of learning the visual arts in this newer format and that it can augment traditional classroom instruction. One thing I did conclude from this project is that this type of learning requires a definite time commitment. Viewing the videos, practicing the techniques, as well as posting student activity and questions is very time consuming. It seems that this method of gaining skills will work better with a full-time student or an adult who is not working and attending school simultaneously, as it may not integrate well into the context of the busy lives of most people.
Radha's Weblog 