Bringing Arts Educators Together

I started in college in the fall of 2004 at Marymount Manhattan College, a small liberal arts college on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I remember being in a friend's dorm, around this time of year seven years ago, when I created my Facebook account. I had resisted, at first. Back in those days, Facebook was only for colleges, and your school had to "get" the Facebook. Being a small college, Marymount only was recognized as a Facebook-enabled institution for a few weeks, and it was a huge buzz around campus. But since I did give in and make my first profile, I've been a social-media connected individual. Although from time to time I "accidentally" lose my Facebook password to keep myself on task.

Facebook's profile layout in 2005, via mashable.com

My generation, the high school class of 2004, were the first fully-Facebooked class. We never experienced college without it, save those few precious weeks before "The Facebook" came to our campus. But why is it, then, that my colleagues in Educational Theatre, many of which are my age, are hesitant to apply social media tools to their practice as professionals? Arts education sorely lags in our use of social media to share ideas and best practices. Prominent arts educators are nowhere to be found on Twitter. Facebook pages of open forums, even here in interconnected New York, barely make a blip on my newsfeed. I usually hear about them via NYU's list-serv emails from the Ed Theatre faculty.

So it should fall to us, the social media generation, to propel our industry into the 21st century. Enter our final project: The Arts Education Exchange. Team Steve Jobs' Zombie Army has begun work on a diary style blog of sorts as our final project. This website, hopefully full of user generated content, will serve as an internet resource where arts educators can share lessons and best practices, advertise best practices, and read entries from leaders in their field. All of this would be supported by social media, with a Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn arm to the Exchange steadily churning out updates.

More on this idea as the group develops it!

Here's what I've been working on for the last week or so:



Cool right? A little bit of backstory here:

I went on vacation this last August with my girlfriend's family. In attendance at our several rented beach houses on Topsail Island, NC were her sister's family, her mother, her aunt, uncle and some cousins. Also present were assorted children, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc. We stayed for a week, and I took about 1000 pictures. I had been a little lazy about posting them to facebook since we got back, since I had to sort through all the photos and the semester had just started.

Luckily, my tech resources class (for which this blog was created) assigned a photo montage project, and I knew I had my outlet to share the photos with my girlfriend and her family. I had some experience with imovie, but the program had completely changed in the last eight years since I'd used it. Still, my general instincts on how to edit video were still intact. I tried my best to sync my transitions with the music, and drive the sequence of photos forward with narrative or some logical order.

I chose to use a song by Arcade Fire, "Wake Up", as the soundtrack. Obviously, I don't have the rights to it. But all that prevents is embedding and viewing the video in New Zealand. Not such a bad tradeoff!

-Rob

PS: My girlfriend's family totally digs the video!