Art Education, Collaboration and the Internet [continued]

Taking the Plunge: Getting Involved in a Telecollaborative Project
Harris (1999) describes a telecollaborative activity as “an educational endeavor that involves people in different locations using Internet tools and resources to work together” (p. 55). Most educational telecollaborations are designed and coordinated by teachers, and most use e-mail to facilitate communication between participants. Although the educational benefits vary depending on the specifics of a telecollaborative project’s purpose and design, in general they provide participating students with an opportunity to encounter multiple perspectives and expand their global awareness both of which are vital in constructing their own knowledge of the social world and of their place within it.

There are essentially two approaches to participating in a telecollaborative art project with your students. You can either join an existing online project or you can initiate one yourself. If you are just beginning to explore the Internet with your students, participating in an ongoing and well-established project offers a convenient way to become acquainted with the logistical components of online collaboration. Once you’ve tested the waters, you’ll be in a better position to consider what sort of telecollaborative project you might start from your own classroom.

There are a number of places to go on the Web to find current and ongoing art projects. Many telecollaborative projects have their own Web sites where you can familiarize yourself with a project’s participation requirements and register your class if you decide to take part. There are also organizational sites that have large project registries that can be searched by subject area, grade level, time frame, and project type. Some of the more popular organizational sites are listed at the end of this article. For now, let’s look at some ongoing telecollaborative projects that that can easily be incorporated into a school art program:

The Art Miles Mural Project
www.kids.state.ct.us/spotlight/mural/intro.htm
Students are invited to design and create murals that will be linked together with murals created by students from all over the world. Also see the Art Miles Mural Project homepage: www.the-art-miles-mural-project.org.

Community Stories
www.artjunction.org/projects/communitystories
Community Stories invites teachers and students to identify and investigate global forces, noteworthy individuals, important events, cultural influences, and other factors that have shaped their local communities in the past or the present. Based on this research, participants can create works of art, writings, Web sites, zines, or other creative expressions that communicate stories of their community. These works can then be shared with a worldwide audience through the project’s website. A discussion board is also available for students involved in the project.

Earth Day Groceries Project
www.earthdaybags.org
The Earth Day Groceries Project is a cost-free environmental awareness project that teams up youth and grocers to spread the message of Earth Day. To participate, teachers simply borrow paper grocery bags from a local grocery store. Students decorate the bags with environmental messages about reuse, recycling, wildlife, or related themes. The bags are then returned to the grocery store on Earth Day, April 22 of each year where customers receive their groceries—along with the message that kids care about our environment.

Empty Bowls Project
www.emptybowls.net/EmptyBowlsProject.htm
Participants create ceramic bowls, then serve a simple meal of soup and bread. Guests choose a bowl to use that day and to keep as a reminder that there are always Empty Bowls in the world. In exchange for a meal and the bowl, the guest gives a suggested minimum donation of ten dollars. The meal sponsors and /or guests choose a hunger-fighting organization to receive the money collected.

KidCast for Peace
creativity.net/kidcast2.html
This virtual event is scheduled each year to take place on Earth Day, April 21. Children of all ages come together to share their art live, and direct persons to their pre-built "KidCast For Peace" Web sites, VRML worlds, chat rooms, Interactive Music spaces, and so on. Depending on the time zone, children at each participating site responds to comments and questions from gathered local and cyber audiences. CU-SeeMe Internet videoconferencing software is used to enable real-time interaction between participating sites.

Monster Exchange
www.monsterexchange.org
In this popular e-mail project, students are asked to create original pictures of monsters and to write descriptions of their monsters. These descriptions are then exchanged with students in another classroom--via the Internet—who are challenged to retranslate them into monster pictures of their own. The written descriptions, original monster pictures, and redrawn monster pictures are scanned and uploaded to the project’s Web site using the browser-based Monster Gallery Builder. Students and teachers can also take advantage of chat rooms and discussion boards for further conversation and feedback about the project.

ThinkQuest
www.thinkquest.org
ThinkQuest is an international competition that encourages students in grades 3-12 to work in teams to create content-rich, educational websites. A team may consist of as many as five students and two adult coaches. Students are encouraged to form teams (via the Internet) with students from other schools or countries who have different interests, skills and cultural backgrounds. ThinkQuest teams draw upon each member’s individual strengths and skills to complete a Web-based educational project that they design for themselves. Teams can also participate in an online ThinkQuest community of students and educators who come together to share information and to assist each other.

Since its inception in 1995, over 100,000 students and teachers from 125 countries have participated in ThinkQuest, making it one of the world's most successful educational technology programs. All contest entries are uploaded to the ThinkQuest Web server and are freely available for classroom use. The resulting ThinkQuest library of approximately 6,000 websites is an extremely popular educational resource that includes Web sites in most subject areas. The following is a small sample of art-related ThinkQuest websites from previous years’ competitions:

Altered Images
1998 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge
library.thinkquest.org/15044
This site shows how to alter and enhance digital images. It also explores the moral dilemmas that may be encountered in the digital-imagining process.

How to Understand a Work of Art
1998 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge
library.thinkquest.org/20868
This site offers guidelines for understanding historical and contemporary art.

The Contemporary Art Experience
1999 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge
library.thinkquest.org/26183
Learn about contemporary women artists and their work.

From Pokemon® to Picasso, Art Rights and Wrongs
2000 ThinkQuest Junior Contest
library.thinkquest.org/J001570
This site teaches students the importance of getting permission to use copyrighted material on their Web sites. (1)

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