For seven days I’ve been back at school—eight if you count my
introduction to the adviser of the multimedia arts students. The student
who introduced me said, later, that she’d hoped some kind of benefits
would accrue to me. She was grateful that I had some video for her Web
site project. The introduction was timely. It got me started on what might
be the conclusion of my 40-year retrospective and the opening of the next
phase of my career.
There is a story I wrote thirty years ago about an art professor who
experienced a kind of Rip Van Winkle event, waking after he’d been
asleep for decades. While I’ve been wide awake, and keeping up with the
times, I feel like that professor I wrote about whose job, at least until
he was useful again as a teacher, was to participate in a retraining
program. The story I wrote begins when he’s introduced to another
“student” who also is in the program. They were called Re-Entrants.
In real life, I plan to meet many students who have missed out on some
of the events of the past two decades, like me, because there was no
apparent need to continue their schooling after they got their university
degrees. Some of them may be my former students; others may be people who
have “skipped” school for fifteen or twenty years while they took care
of other things in their lives. Some might be in the career they planned,
others may have moved horizontally to other interests.
As for me, I think I’m on the same track I set out on in the
mid-sixties: Teaching. Since I wanted to teach on the college level, this
also meant spending time in so-called research and practice (plus service)
that are the mark of the academic professional. Ironically, I researched
myself right out of traditional university life since I proved that my
field—printmaking—had not stopped at handmade fine art prints but
matured to become hi-tech reproduction.
We are experiencing a new era I call the age of digital
reproduction. As far as I know, traditional schools of art do not have
a course such as might be called “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital
Reproduction.” I was about to propose a course titled “The History of
Multimedia Arts in the Pacific Northwest” when I realized I didn’t
fully understand schools today—who the people are and what the
technology is like.
I feel as though the chances of my proposal would be better (and
there’d be a better opportunity for it to be offered on-line) if I knew
the system better. And since the emphasis might be on service to the
student, then it would be best if I knew the student better. I don’t
mean know the student as a professor knows the student (or thinks he or
she knows), but know the student the way one knows one’s self.
In my planning, I envision a recursive effect: To teach a course, you
must learn it. To learn it, it’s sometimes best to teach it. Since my
long term goal (forty more years of TRPS) will require distance learning
and hybrid digital game-based learning schemes. The best way to start
learning is become a student, walk in the shoes of a student, live the
schedule of a student, and think of a career like a student thinks of his
or her “dream”.
My game, Emeralda, is a lifetime game. Someone wrote a book titled The
Game of Life and How to Play It. Emeralda is my game of life, and I am
learning how to play it. If it serves me well, as I believe it does, then
it’s a good idea to share it with other people in this day and age. To
share this game I think the first step is to coordinate what I might call
“industry standards” with the new elements that Emeralda entails.
Distance learning is one of the elements.
Pre-Media Arts Student
The first step is to apply, focusing on the multimedia arts courses
offered at my closest community college, Shoreline Community College.
Located only ten miles from my home, and offering a full range of
multimedia arts courses.
The second step is to create a skunkworks virtual program to parallel
my real role as a student. That is, I enroll as a normal student in two
classes, and then I “enroll” myself in a skunkworks course of my own.
In this fashion I design my curriculum as I’m living in the SCC
curriculum.
Here’s how it works. I follow the course outline at SCC, but I write
a parallel outline geared to my own vision, that is, a curriculum in
multimedia arts based on the future—when an online version might exist.
I can make innovations like having a “buddy” system along the lines of
Proximates, and follow a BIOS based on that idea. I can make a
prerequisite such as writing a three year business plan before I am
allowed into the program. A Web site—with URL domain name service would
be another prerequisite and, of course, demonstrate that I have my own
tools.
This is a new idea. I’m still thinking about it. But
true to my theory of concurrent marketing (of an online hybrid course,
History of Multimedia Arts of the Pacific Northwest Since 1935”), sales
(of an online art ed shell), design (structure and file structure) and
production (actual course-taking), I think I will pursue this line to a
logical conclusion.
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About
the Author: Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor of Art in
Seattle. He taught 19 years at the UW as a professor of art, traditional
printmaking and media arts. Resigning at 43 to start his own learning,
research and production company, he created Emeralda in 1992, a game
strategy he likens to a fantasy region accessible only by computer. He
invented rules-of-play and an operating system he wants to be an online
interactive game. He’s immersed himself in a virtual promised land in
the age of digital reproduction.
For
further information via e-mail: Ritchie@seanet.com,
and see the professional Web site at www.seanet.com/~ritchie.
The company’s name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha #105, Seattle, WA 98109.
Telephone (206) 285-0658. This article’s statistics are: 1122
Words. 5176
Characters. 2
Pages. ipp30816
Trading Places Absent Professor As Student. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie,
Jr.
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