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Writing
Art and the Global Classroom
Published in Aviso Magazine, Fall 2008
In its eighth year of operation, deviantART (www.deviantart.com/ ) is an online artist’s community, home to 8 million users from 190 countries. There are countless art galleries and art collections on the web, but deviantART is one of the largest and most active virtual art communities currently in existence. I was introduced to the site by my students who use it for ideas, tutorials and raw materials. Many of my graphic design students maintain profiles on deviantART and they regularly upload their artwork, drawings and photos. I was interested in determining why the site appealed to my students, and I was open to learning whatever I could from the site, so in the summer of 2006 I created a profile on deviantART and began uploading my own artwork.
I was curious as to what my students and their peers were learning from this site. As a teenager in the seventies I learned about art from attending class, looking at art books, visiting art galleries and drawing in my sketchbook. My students, who grew up with cell phones, computers and the internet, have had a very different experience. They are learning about art from looking at websites and by the time they get to college, most of them have been using digital cameras and computers to create art for years. For centuries art teachers were sure that the techniques and skills they learned as apprentice artists were entirely appropriate to pass onto their students. Thanks to the radical changes in culture and technology in the last 20 years, I began to wonder what skills, knowledge and assumptions I needed to help my students negotiate this fast moving, global, competitive electronic marketplace. I hoped to gain some insight about these issues by researching the deviantART site.
Originally I created a deviantART profile because I felt it would help me better understand the site. However, instead of maintaining a disinterested researcher’s stance, I quickly began to watch my page views. The number of times your artwork is viewed is logged and displayed on your profile and gallery pages. After a few years on the site, I find it fascinating to look at the page views of different pieces in my gallery. Certain pieces I personally like have very few page views, which indicates to me that they are not as popular as other pieces in my gallery. Thanks to deviantART I know that some of my pieces have been viewed thousands of times by people from all over the world.
In the historic market era, people worked to amass physical capital and exchange goods. In today’s network era, people aim to amass intellectual capital and exchange ideas.
On the web you can decide what to look at and what to participate in.You can formulate and state your opinions with a lightning fast reaction time. I learned this myself when I uploaded a painting to my gallery on deviantART. A few people liked it and I got some instant feedback. One teenager stated she loved the image, but gave suggestions on how I could improve part of it and I replied that I agreed with her critique. Don Tapscott, a writer who has researched what he calls the “net generation” states that “for the first time ever, children are taking control of critical elements of the communications revolution”. I like the fact that even though I am a trained art teacher with well established credentials, on deviantART, I am just one of millions of artists. The feedback I have received from artists, many of them teenagers from different countries, is refreshing and exciting. I feel like I am a student in a global classroom.
To a member of the net generation, technology is as natural as breathing. Baby boomers can learn technology and become very adept at it, but for boomers the technology is not a natural extension of their being. The young learn to manage whatever computer tasks they are doing quickly and intuitively. I have noticed this while teaching software in the computer lab. The younger students usually learn computer operations easily, while mature students sometimes struggle. Based on my experience from browsing the site, most deviantART users are teenagers. They are comfortable with the technology and they are not shy about showing their artwork to the entire world.
Tapscott suggests that the values inherent among the net generation include independence, strong opinions, collaboration, and participation. He feels that the new technology offers wonderful opportunities for learning, in comparison to the numbing effect that TV had on baby boomers. According to the research Tapscott did with 300 young people over the course of one year: “the children of the digital age appear to be smart, accepting of diversity, curious, assertive, self-reliant, high in self-esteem, and global in orientation.” After participating in deviantART, I would agree with these statements. I observed collaboration, tolerance, articulate debate, energy, and enthusiasm, most of which was coming from 16 - 19 year olds, if their profile information was correct.
On deviantART, my academic credentials and occupation carry very little currency. My work is displayed in the same manner as everybody else’s and if people like it they visit my page and leave a comment. Young people have given me insightful criticisms about some weaker aspects of my images. I have learned from deviantART members and hopefully they have learned something from me.
Jeremy Rifkin claims that our economy is in the process of dematerializing, and all remnants of world culture are being co-opted and commodified. In the historic market era, people worked to amass physical capital and exchange goods. In today’s network era, people aim to amass intellectual capital and exchange ideas. Instead of working to own things we will work to gain “access to services and experiences”. If this is true, it will have an impact on all creative people. What Rifkin is saying about the economy certainly applies to deviantART, A great deal of the artwork on deviantART exists only as computer information, not as a piece of paper or canvas in the real world. In addition, although it may appear to be just a huge online art gallery, as an online community deviantART is very effective as a supplier of experiences. I learned this vividly during my participation on the site. I began to look forward to checking my page views, and reading comments people had made about my work. I even scanned some old drawings and touched them up because I wanted to make my gallery look as good as possible. I find that the community experiences supplied by deviantART keep me coming back to the site.
The many online experiences our students are occupied with are a force to be reckoned with. After participating in deviantART, I truly believe teachers should start an account on the site, upload their artwork and let the fun and learning begin.
Links and references
Deviantart profile: http://robincanada.deviantart.com/
Aviso Magazine: http://www.nstu.ca/app?service=page/Journals
Aviso Magazine is the official publication of the
Nova Scotia Teachers Union,
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