Bulletin Board

Jackson was born August 25th 2008, 9lbs 1oz. He has two older brothers, Max who just turned 5 and Sam who is 2. They are very much enjoying having a new baby brother in the house and we’re settling in well as a family of five.

- Tammy

I recently listened to the audio book, Brain Rules (http://www.brainrules.net)by John Medina, and recommend it to our faculty.

- Maria Creyts, MFA

AP Photo: A pumpkin eating a smaller pumpkin is seen in Bismark, N.D. - JP

Click for larger image

Kane Wendy Barr
Water Color, Acrylic and pastel

News Flash: Wendy Barr breaks the seal. After being sucked into the digital world and not touching a paintbrush for more than a decade, Wendy finally decided to paint. Inspired by a photograph of a close friend’s baby she...breaks the seal. The sky is the limit now...we’ll keep you posted! - Wendy Barr

There has been recent troubles with .doc vs. .docx files being readable between different students because of the new Word software. I've had a hard time finding file conversion updates for mac or pc that are free and work well. Maybe you know the answer to this? Perhaps it would be helpful to other teachers? I realize this is more of a question than a "submission" per se, LOL, but I thought I'd throw it out there as important. :) Thanks, J. Diane Martonis

NOTE: If anyone knows the ultimate answer email it to me and I will post it in the next newsletter -

However - I googled the issue and came up with:

microsoft.com/downloads and Zamzar, an online file converter (free!)

-JP

Attention Artists!

North Light Books is now accepting submissions for the latest edition of our Best of Watercolor series, Splash 11: New Directions.

How to enter: Get the entry form from our all-new Splash website at www.splash11.com! Also check for our upcoming ads in TAM and Watercolor Artist magazine. Deadline to enter is January 16th, 2009. On the website: Get updated Splash news and information, view the Splash art gallery, find updated book release info, download the entry form, get digital submission tips, view a list of winners for Splash 11 http://splash11.com/

- Ruth Canaway

Crossing the finish line at the 60-mile Philadelphia Breast Cancer 3-Day in October is adjunct faculty member Gayle Hendricks.

Humor

I don’t know if you could use this – but it made me laugh. :) Marie Patierno

 

Marnie found this on Facebook:

You Know You're a Graphic Designer When...

You have bags under your eyes so big you'd have to check them in at Heathrow Airport

You watch the superbowl just for the commercials

You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away

You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas

You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes

You are completely immune to subliminal advertising

You look upon a well-designed project with either:
sympathy OR extreme jealousy

Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse

You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride

You practically take caffeine intravenously

You have an appreciation for everything unique

You've been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.

"You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement."

More...

 

Noteworthy

exhibitions

Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn - Click for larger view

Here is news of a current exhibit - click for larger view -Maria Creyts

New Work by Joe Podlesnik - click for larger view

Click for larger view

Mike Massengale, full-time online faculty for AIP has just returned from another successful show in Rehoboth Beach Delaware as the Official Artist of the Autumn Jazz Fest 2008. This is his forth-consecutive year as the festivals artist. The paintings and design of Massengale are sold as commemorative posters and T-shirts for the festival. The festival is a five-day music concert, which includes groups like Al Jarreau (2005), George Benson (2006), Queen Latifia (2007) and the Neville Brothers as well as Simone (2008).

- Mike Massengale

awards

Jeff Prentice was awarded the 2008 Technology Hero Award for the 8th Annual Tech Tools for Schools Awards, by the Technology Training Foundation of America. As part of the award the Carlsbad High School Art Department will receive 10 new computers.

Teaching

If any of you are working with audio files/podcasts/etc. there is a YouTube-like service that I just came across where you can upload your audio critiques and then embed them, with a player, into the classroom. It is houndbite.com and it seems to work great! - David Lyons, Faculty | Graphic Design

I have a couple of links to share for the newsletter.  

I've started making video tutorials and posting them on You Tube, with plans to eventually embed them in a website and/or in the classroom when appropriate.  Most of them (so far) are for Color Theory, but if anyone else wants to use them for their classes and/or make suggestions for what I could do better or what to include, they are here:

youtube.com/user/shaleylouise

Also for color theory, there is a really interesting website with lots of color illusions related to simultaneous contrast, after-image and ground subtraction.  Don't know if this is the sort of link you might include in the newsletter, but here it is:

<OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm

From Sarah Haley, Foundations, Art Institute of Pittsburgh - Online Division
Foundations, Art Institute of Austin

JING

Try it now! - Marnie Michels

JING is a program used by several instructors here at AIOP in order to communicate on a more “personal” level. Jing can be used to create a video capture or an image capture.

Use a Video Capture to:

• Discuss a student’s work both orally and with using tools inside a program like Acrobat to follow the oral discussion.
• Give a critique on a students piece(s) Use your mouse to either point to or circle areas you are discussing within the piece
• Create a software tutorial for a student
• Discuss “how to” use a certain tool or function, in a particular software program, for individual students work

Use Image Capture to:

• Mark up any items on a students piece that needs to be revised
• Add notes on a piece, with specific instructions
• Give general, quick, bulleted feedback points

Sign up is easy. Simply go to jingproject.com and follow through to set up a FREE account. With this account you will also sign up for a Screencast.com account where the JING video captures or image captures you create are stored. Screencast is also FREE.

Pluses

• Students reap the benefits of hearing inflection in our voices
• Students can quickly view their critique or quickly see a tutorial
• Students can view each others critiques, from the instructor, with ease and speed
• Students have the ability to pause the video capture, while they work on the revisions suggested or replay
• Students can save the tutorials on their hard drive in order to refer back to them at another time

Minuses

• JING only allows a 5 minute video capture to be completed
• There are a few limitations to the screencast free space
• There are no editing capabilities only pausing, stopping, or canceling all together

The pluses out weigh the minuses!

www.jingproject.com

Click here for the Jing PDF used in Marnie and Merrily's workshop

Jeff Prentice weighs in on Jing:

Jing has revolutionized how I teach. I do video crits for each student twice a week. They are under 5 minutes, but packed with much more information than any typed critique (higher word counts) and students hear my voice and inflection.

Student comments

"OOooo! Jing is great. That is very cool. I think that is a perfect medium for a teacher critique."

"I think this is an excellent format for critiques. It makes it more personal to hear you talk to us."

"I really enjoyed listening to your critique with jing. I love it! It really brings the whole "classroom" feeling back, I like that I can visually see the areas of my assignments that you are referring to. Thanks again! Can't wait to see what you have to say on my next assignment. BTW is jing a new thing, you're actually the first professor to use it, and it's really very useful and practical for Art school, when dealing with art work via internet."

It is very time efficient as well, and less tedious than typing for me.

Here is an example from a design course. What you see below is what I post to the student, a short summary with a link to the website where the video is archived.

Hi! Great shapes - I commented on margins, maybe the label being too close to the line - minor things-
Click on the link below to view the video critique - and thanks for your post! (:
http://screencast.com/t/9lcNWeP07Pg

You can see what your archive might look like here jingnotes.html

I did sign up for the pro account for $10 a month as it gives me more bandwidth and storage. The added expense is well worth it.

Things to watch

• File sizes can get big so I resize my browser window that has the student work in it, and I keep an eye on time.
• Black and white image crits usually run around 2 or 3 mb
• Color images can get much bigger, around 7 mb for a 2 or 3 minute crit.
• Don't delete your crits to make space each session as you PPAR involves reviewing past work!
• Be sure to post an announcement in class to give students a heads up. I use the following:

Hi Class - I use Jing for critiquing your work - I open your image, and capture video and audio of my observations, and then I post the link for you to watch. It is very cool, the files are fairly small and stream quite well. Students like it a lot. If you do have any issues playing the video then go to http://www.adobe.com/downloads/ and download the latest Flash player. If your computer meets the minimum requirements you won't have any problems. Thanks! J

I also use Jing for tutorials. Here is one I did on the fly - quick to make, easy access by students thumbnail tutorial

Let me know if you have any questions (: JP

Marnie Michels teaching tips: How effective are you in the classroom?

What is the meaning of being effective?

- Are you responding to your students emails within 24 hours?

- Are you checking the Questions for Professor and/or Problems and Solutions section each time you access the course(s) you are teaching?

- Are you calling your students between day 3 and 4 of week 1?

- Do you create announcements under Course Home to make sure students are constantly informed of Scheduled Maintenance for the Online Classroom, Learning Center weekly topics,

- Are you accessing the Graphic Design Resource Group in AiConnections?

- Are you setting up your classroom on time?

- Do you give students past student work examples when you set up the classroom and place first responses for each assignment?

- Do you engage conversation with each student in the biography assignment for week 1?

- In discussion areas of the curriculum, do you prod students to engage with each other?

- Do you place thorough comments in the grade book regarding how a student can achieve more and how the work turned in has or has not met the criteria for the assignment?

- Do you turn grades in by day 2 of the following week, every week?

- Are you in the classroom 5 days a week without missing class 2 consecutive days?

- Do you show students your own work and discuss your own professional experiences?

- Are you connecting with other faculty, asking questions and offering resources for each other?

- Do you check your classes each time you are given your next class or set of classes, for errors? And then do you utilize the Content Alert button on the course lecture pages?

More... (PDF 600k)

 

Alison Barrows-Young: Learning Disabilities

Dear Colleagues,

Do you ever have students that act consistently like any or all of the below?

➢ Don't seem to understand yours or other student's social cues?
Always taking everything out of context or with a negative attitude?
➢ Have a difficult time doing things as they are "usually" done to the
point of seeming stubborn or even belligerent?.
➢ Don't "get" humor or over react defensively and angrily to criticism?
➢ Refuse to participate on the thread or take part in group assignments?
➢ Tend to want to talk or write about themselves rather than the work
of other students. Always look at every situation as if it is about
them or from their personal perspective?
➢ May be unusually argumentative?
➢ Have trouble with changes in the syllabus or class routine?
➢ Don't do well with communication, either verbally (written), or socially?

These could be symptoms of non-verbal learning disabilities. Often
times an individual with mild disabilities don't even know that they
have them. They might comprehend that they have been, and often are,
pegged as difficult by most people but actually have no understanding
as to why. Often they resort to a life belief that that everyone else
is difficult and out to get them. More than likely they have a
seriously low self-esteem, as they have been told, all their lives, by
parents, teachers and their peers that they are difficult, mean, or
even bad. Read more...

TIPS

11/18/08

Notes on… SKYPE !
http://www.skype.com/

About three years ago, a friend working on a doctoral degree in Creative Arts in Australia called me, using Skype, to tell me all about… Skype!
I passed the info on to my brother who was then a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; it solved his struggles with phonebills for international calls to the US.
These days, I call friends in the UK and Europe from my computer using Skype.
It’s also good for conference calls on the EDMC line.

Skype details
Computer to computer calls are free. 800 number calls from a computer are free.

Calling in on the EDMC line for faculty meetings or webex conferences from a computer is free (since 800 number calls are free).

Buy Skype credit online with your credit card for inexpensive calls from a computer to a landline or cell phone. Calls to cell phones cost a little more. USA rates: 2.1 cents per minute to a landline phone, 2.4 to a cell. (Cost is more for Alaska.)

Parties communicating from a computer need to use a headset to avoid echoes. I usually use Sony earbuds; you can also pair a bluetooth headset to a bluetooth-capable computer. If you are only listening (for instance on a Webex conference), sound can be played aloud from your computer in a manner similar to a speaker phone.

If you are averse to typing on your phone key pad, you can send text (or SMS – “short message service”) messages from a computer via Skype. It’s possible to set things up so that recipients can reply to your cell phone number; text/SMS messages can’t be received on a computer through Skype. The cost, 11.2 cents per 160 characters, is deducted from your Skype credit balance.

I don’t have first-hand experience with an iPhone, yet I understand that since iPhones are wifi devices Skype calls can be made from them. …I just checked with the Kansas City Apple Store, three blocks away: they say to make an iPhone Skype-capable, you need to download and install Fring: http://www.fring.com/

Skype trivia: Europeans pronounce Skype with two syllables -- “skypey.”
; ^ )

- Maria Creyts

Photoblog

November - it is in the 90s in Southern California and the Santa Ana winds are blowing hard. That haze in the sky above the rollercoaster at Knott's Berry Farm was caused by three fires in the Los Angeles area, one only 20 miles from downtown. Those gray circles floating in the foreground in the photo below are ashes.

Profiles

Hi; I’m adjunct professor Bryson Dean, and I live in Somerset, MA, in the southern part of the state. I'm also an artist, graphic designer, and have been with AIPOD since the fall of ‘07.

I live with my fiancé Brian and three bad-tempered cats, Smith, Kiko and Benny. I enjoy music (jazz, rock and electronica), travel, cooking, interior design and gardening.

My MFA graduate work involved public art installations, and one of my career goals is to design interiors for community and public spaces. I also work with photography and digital imaging, and Photoshop and Illustrator are invaluable for my work. There are examples of recent Illustrator experiments on my blog at http://mbrysondean.blogspot.com if you’re interested.

I have been teaching graphic design courses for over nine years. I truly enjoy teaching and working with motivated students; I learn as much from them as they (hopefully) do from me.

Before I began teaching, I was for five years the Senior Graphics Designer at NECN (New England Cable News), a regional news TV station in Massachusetts. I have experience in project management, corporate communications, teaching, graphic design, desktop publishing and website design.

I’m really happy to be involved with these online courses. It's fantastic that we can all take advantage of technology that allows people from different locales to connect, communicate and grow in knowledge and expertise. I just starting working with Jing (it’s great!) and I’ve been attending several Faculty Development workshops, which are informative and fun. I look forward to much more continued involvement with online teaching and learning.

Thanks, Bryson
bdean@aii.edu

My name is Margaret Helthaler and I live in the Catskill Mountain Region of New York State. I celebrated my 40th birthday in April. I'm blessed with a wonderful husband and two beautiful children - Gavin, my 13 year old son and Julie, my 8 year old daughter. We share our home with an overweight cat with painfully pointy feet, a black toy poodle with questionable habits and a little grey Netherland dwarf rabbit who is too cute for words. To add to the craziness, we adopted a puppy in March. She's a Great Dane/Lab mix. At 10 months, she must weigh close to 100 lbs (?) and is in a race with my son to see who will be taller than me by the end of the year. : )

I’ve worked in the design field for over twenty years (starting out as the manager of an advertising department at the tender age of 19) and have been a freelance graphic designer for over 15 years. I work primarily with non-profit land stewardship organizations. Over the last ten years, I also taught graphic design, photography and drawing courses as an adjunct at the three colleges in our area. I began teaching for the Art Institute Pittsburgh Online Division last fall and was added as a full time faculty member in March.

I received my BFA in graphic design from SUNY College at New Paltz and went on to receive my MFA in visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. About the time I began my MFA, I decided to invest a good portion of my energies into fine art photography. My process incorporates tools I was first introduced to as a graphic designer; I use a flatbed scanner to examine fine details in the environment more closely. If interested, you can view samples of my work at:

MargaretHelthaler.com

or read about it on my (horribly neglected) blog:
without-a-lens.blogspot.com

In addition to being a wife/mother/educator/artist, I enjoy reading, writing, hiking and biking. I like all kinds of music, but lean towards alternative rock...


I’ve attached the picture of me with our puppy “Pani”. It’s not the best picture of me, but the dog looks good. ;-) Let me know if you need anything else and thanks for asking. : )

-Margaret

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About

Contributor gallery (those who sent photos, anyways)

This newsletter is produced by Jeff Prentice and Marnie Michels for faculty in the department of GD and foundations, part of AIPO. It is not an official EDMC document or publication - it is for general communication between faculty. Any questions on content, or interest in submissions contact
jeff prentice or marnie michels

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