the digital haze.

Image by dave_mcmt via Flickr

this is not a joke; that's actually the name.

i was looking around for advances in technology in public schools, and i found new media high school. it's a charter school in philadelphia specializing in, what else, new media. the curriculum is based primarily around digital multimedia and project-based learning, intended to give students skills that will be of greater benefit to them in their professional lives.

their aim is to go beyond the textbook-memorization study techniques of the past and teach to students to be actively engaged in the problems they are presented with and think critically about solutions.

while it might sound simple enough, it's actually a pretty innovative form of pedagogy. i think you'd be hard-pressed to find many teachers who would be able to conform to this method, though i think it might benefit the students.

this discovery mainly made me wonder; what is the future of technology in regard to education? we already have distance-learning programs, but will there ever be a program in place for the majority of public school students to opt for such? and also, what will this mean for certain classes where experience is imperative? as an undergrad studying art education, this is a real concern. when will conveniences and "inter-connectedness" online begin to overtake the real-life interconnectedness that interaction provides?

Image via CrunchBase

the "face" of facebook seems to be changing at a very rapid pace. i logged on the other day and noticed the new format and could only think of one thing: twitter.

i started my twitter account a few weeks before the class set them up, and i have to admit, i didn't really know what to do with it. not many of my friends have twitter accounts, so it didn't seem all that useful. since then, more and more people and organizations are getting twitter accounts, and it's made the site make a little more sense to me.

but back to facebook...what? the format was really confusing at first, and i'm still not a very big fan of it. the wall posts, status updates, and everything is just thrown in together with no graphic notation of what's what. i think the main reason this re-design took place is because the folks at facebook are noticing that twitter is picking up speed.

most of us have such short attention spans that we now only want to receive updates and information in a single line. we skim over blogs and disregard anything that's too long. i myself am guilty of this; if anyone posts a blog that is somewhat lengthy, i have to be pretty interested in whatever it is that they're talking about to read through the whole thing.

while i appreciate twitter and its simplicity, i'm kind of appalled at our lack of focus. and i also think that facebook should do its own thing and not attempt to replicate the format of another popular website.

Image by Davezilla was taken via Flickr

testing out the zemanta...

this is wicked awesome!

in other news, i found this neat article involving twitter.

a guy from the baltimoremd twitter account got the twitter "fail whale" a bunch of natty boh heads tattooed on his leg to promote the city's twitter account.

i'd say that's new level of dedication.

Image via Wikipedia

last blog, i talked about the effect of technology on the world of photography, and this time i'd like to continue on the topic of technology and art. another area where art and technology have merged is in the development of graphic design.

the number of people involved in the graphic design community has increased steadily over the past few years. companies are becoming more and more reliant on graphic design as they begin to emphasize marketing and promotion. but along with this string of creative professionals comes a new breed of artsy imitators. it seems like every teenage kid with a copy of adobe photoshop is now a "graphic designer", and i think it really takes some of the credibility away from the real artists.

along those lines, i wanted to discuss the issue of vector images. vector images are images created using mathematical formulas to generate shapes and designs that are easily manipulated and re-sized in graphics programs. they make designing layouts and images with multiple layers much easier on the designer. however, there are many instances of graphic designers who use only vector images and don't utilize drawn images at all. in fact, some graphic designers don't have artistic drawing skills at all!

personally, i feel like a "graphic artist" should be just that. an artist who works with graphics. while i understand that utilizing vector images is a huge benefit to most graphic designers, i think that a certain level of artistic skill should still be necessary. when graphic designers no longer need this level of skill i think it undermines their importance and talent.