How to Create A Living Prints Online Hybrid Distance Learning For Profit School:

Staying Alive in the Dying World of Fine Art Hand Printmaking

Taking his cue from an unlikely source (video games), the author connects the ideals expressed by today’s visionary game developers with his own vision of a perfect teaching and learning online art studio that’s focused on printmaking and multimedia arts.

Microsoft game design expert Jonathan Baron said if you created an online game that made people feel useful, you’d rule the world. I don’t know if he meant planet Earth or one of those “worlds” known as virtual places where gamers make their homes. He specified that all kinds of people could be made to feel useful, and this is one of the keys to the success of games.[i]

His words rang true for me, because I experience this need to “be useful” every day in my real life. In my past life I enjoyed that feeling, although now I realize I was so close to my value in teaching college that I couldn’t appreciate what a pleasure I was experiencing. It was almost twenty years ago that I resigned from formal college teaching, yet not a day has gone by that I didn’t think back about the best of times I enjoyed when I was teaching.

There’s still an afterglow from those years because occasionally I reconnect with former students, and I can see that something they learned in their art classes (including mine, I think) has kept them going for up to thirty or forty years. What’s missing in my life, though, is the face-to-face encounters with students in the context of printmaking. Printmaking—the fine art of making plates and printing them by hand—is my native art form, and teaching the quirky, complicated processes was my specialty.

So when I read Jonathan Baron’s words, they rang true, for it is to restore my usefulness in the age of digital reproduction that is my aim. My target is to have the pleasure of both face-to-face meetings plus the benefits of using digital technologies in such ways as to enhance both the personal and the distant relationships that the online education world is making possible.

For years I have been working on the graphic user interface (GUI) for a game that I think would serve as the intermediary for an online printmaking class. I’m writing this essay to see if I’m ready to describe it. For over a month I’ve been meeting and talking with a college professor at Shoreline Community College; I’ve also been using the college’s multimedia lab to familiarize myself with their operating systems, software and networks.

In two weeks I plan to attend classes as an auditor, and this is the next phase of my field research on how to structure an online art course in printmaking that will augment the students’ experiences in their normal, face-to-face courses and lead us all into a highly effective, new way of teaching, learning, researching and practicing fine art printmaking.

Thus, I’ll enumerate the method to create “living prints” online and up close.

1. Learn to use computers and the Internet, e-mail, imaging, and necessary software.

2. Learn the art, craft and design of a non-toxic printmaking process such as Japanese woodcut

3. Teach participants to use a video game interface that encourages community agglomeration around both games and printmaking

4. From this initial community, form an alliance that owns this course and sustains it.

While the above four steps may seem too easy to be possible, given that no one thus far has attempted to do this, they are sufficient as an outline for the moment.

What I learned from reading Jonathan Baron’s words (and the book in which his essay is published) is that online games are a new medium. We’re in the Keystone Cops phase of this medium, he wrote, so we have a lot of work in front of us before the dimensions and usefulness of online games (and game-based learning).

Baron gave us a table of contrasts where he showed the difference between standalone, single player games and online, massively multiplayer games. The game I have in mind is not for “masses” of players. I think only 20-50 people will play in a given sequence. Nonetheless, I was struck by the wording Baron used in his table. His words actually described that I felt was life in the printmaking division of the UW Art School.

It could be, then, that these words could serve as the “text” to introduce a reader to the idea of a highly effective online hybrid art course in printmaking.

He wrote massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) are:

1. A social activity

2. Played by yourself but you’re not alone

3. A product of who you, the player, are

4. Another world

5. Directed by the players

6. Collection of players’ motives

7. Mastery of posed challenges in the beginning.

For each of the seven lines above I could write a chapter on the comparison based on real, face-to-face courses I taught at the UW Art School in the halcyon years between 1966-1985. I could interpolate the student and the player, turning the art world, and the art school, into a game.

This essay cannot go into greater detail now as to how to create a “Living Prints” course, but it is a beginning. I’m grateful to Dick Davis, the professor at Shoreline Community College for helping me reach this point in the development of an online experience in art.

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: 1067 Words. 5129 Characters. 2 Pages. ios30904 How To Create Living Prints Online. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie, Jr.