Online learning outside the accredited university

—Another art—

I have begun the process of studying "coding" through an online learning website. It is not an accredited college, this website. But that doesn't matter to me. In fact, even though I've completed several college degrees, I find the idea of online learning outside of traditional schools more valid than ever. To be credentialed by a source that does not charge thousands of dollars a class seems, in some ways, more credible than a degree from an institution that treated my education like a cash cow. I'm not even sure that a certificate matters to me—I'm doing the free version of the class.

So why the new attitude about traditional college degrees? Well, in retrospect, I can see that there were problems at some of the colleges I studied at.

At first, everything was good. In 1985, I began taking college classes at a community college. That was fine. Tuition was affordable, the classes were practical, and I was studying with people of all ages from all different backgrounds. I felt a tangible, rather than simply theoretical, connection to a long history of ideas.

Years later, however, studying first toward a PhD and then changing to an MFA, I found the following situations new and alarming:

• At a private, for-profit school, upon contacting the university, a recruiter had me enrolled and had set up financial aid before we hung up from that first phone inquiry. Acceptance was a foregone conclusion. He pushed a button and the university coffers filled to overflowing as money gushed from the pipelines of the banks and the US Department of Education.
• I became immediately dependent upon student loans as a source of sustainable income. In this terribly inequitable economy, I never had as good a job as being a student.
• On the other hand, one single class at a private school in 2017 costs about the same as a whole school year of full-course-load-plus terms in 1985. And the prospects for jobs upon graduation are no better in 2017. This is due largely, of course, to my proclivity toward creative rather than practical pursuits. But let's be honest, both impracticality and costliness have soared side-by-side over the last few decades. Now, with a humanities degree, you hardly even get a chance.
• Like other institutions, the university is "top-down." Many professors who made it to a position of authority got there by being low-key, easy to get along with, agreeable, and sometimes even mediocre (some by nature and some for survival) and then spent their energy keeping the talented students from challenging them too much (in the students' best interests, if mediocrity and conformity are the measures). A good number of these authorities reserved the right to declare truth in the classroom even when their assertions were as patently erroneous as to be laughable in any normal space of discourse.There were brilliant lecturers, too, of course. But I'm listing my concerns, here.
• As far as networking with professors is concerned, many of them rewarded compliance and had less than passionate interest in furthering our careers. Often this was simply because of their isolation from any career but one—that of university teaching. I never felt I was mentored by a large percent of my professors, though I felt like most of them had well-meaning advice to share. Even still, we were in school, not the labor force; the advice was usually about studies.
• Even while some professors may have felt threatened a bit by us students, as a whole they had no problem inviting us into the pyramid scheme whereby we paid for the hopes of one day beating our peers to the throne of our own professorship. But these days, as full-time faculty positions have all but been decimated, this pyramid scheme starts to feel as hopeless as a Ponzi scheme. Still, profs will helpfully illuminate the merits and rewards of making it through the dissertation. You can't help but learn a lot, if nothing else. And there are, of course, rewards in that.
• But speaking of sucking people in, two schools I attended regularly recruited their undergrads to return and be grad students, exploiting them for cheap labor as overworked TAs, and then hired the same folks to be their (ultimately non-tenured, part-time or contract) faculty. This inbreeding has repercussions. Both of these schools displayed an identical tendency toward polar factions in areas of research, in clear differentiation from each other: straight realism on one side and pure abstraction on the other. I blame their institutional provincialism for this. Nothing "in between" was tolerated.  At one of the schools an attempt toward anything other than those choices was treated as an impossibility.
• Much of the most important learning that I gained came from my own efforts to study beyond the course curriculum. I was self-directed, despite the regimented programs, but learning for learning's sake was constantly undermined by learning for earning credentials. Or at least learning for learning how to "learn." Compliance was rewarded over broader competence.
• Speaking of learning to learn (and to clarify my use of the phrase), many of the courses I took reinforced bad ways of learning by rewarding us with grades immediately upon completing tasks instead of evaluating us over time when we could have proved retention. In other cases, we were taught how to pass tests instead of how to drill our memory, practice competence, illustrate expertise, or communicate ideas. Predicting the teacher's biases became a skill. While I definitely learned a lot about research and note taking and reading and writing and comprehension and, certainly, thinking, there were times when I engaged in the best forms of study only to be punished when I quickly found myself more knowledgeable than I ought to have been.
• But there were superficialities in other ways, too. Professors engaged in an economy of fifty-cent words that they had no intention of ever really granting deep meaning to: buzzwords and sacred texts used as currency to secure their positions. In retrospect, the so-called leftist philosophers couldn't have been more fundamentalist in their thinking, an odd mix of puritanism, pragmatism, and positivism in drag as progressive thought. I'm talking US universities, here. I have no idea what it's like elsewhere.
• This kind of ideology became increasingly apparent to me the more I studied. I enrolled in an intro class that required only one text book, written by one author, with no references to the history of thought about the subject, no accounting of the contributions of important thinkers on the subject, and absolutely zero citations. Just this one ultra-conservative maverick whom conservative think tanks wouldn't even align with. We called the class "Intro to Economics."
• And while we are on the subject of textbooks. Many classes required textbooks that cost upwards of two hundred dollars apiece. Some were even paperbacks. Almost all were revised (the order of the chapters changed) at least yearly—often every term—to force us to buy them new. Our quizzes came from the questions at the ends of the chapters, which were changed every edition. Sometimes the books were written by the prof or the department and published by the university. They were always twelve inches wide so we couldn't photocopy them. When asked by students to place the textbook on reserve in the library, the instructors would stall and make excuses—they were instructed by their departments to do so. In other, more succinct words, we were treated as captive customers rather than apprentices or eager learners.
• One school even manufactured their own (not quite up to par) supplies and sold them on a website that was designed to look independent, registered by a third party registrant to hide their contact information from us. They then required those supplies for their classes, forcing us to pay quite a bit for them. They did, at least, allow us to resell them to other students at the end of the course.
• To legitimize and market their teaching and to satisfy accreditation, the universities would delude themselves with outrageous conceits of how their products work and how they would deliver them. One school claimed their online program was identical to their onsite program, and instead of promoting the differing strengths of each, attempted to construct the most incredible "virtual reality" for the online students, trying to force them to treat two dimensions as actual objects, and compelling the remote students (and the instructors) to keep their "in-class work" and "homework" straight. To add insult to injury, they would deny resources to the online students to thwart "cheating."

Ah, so much bile; such choler. Over the last hour, as I write this, these are the memories that I have dredged up while grumbling a bit too much about the dark side of college. Such antics as I have described can exist in non-accredited online learning, too. Heck, some online learning is the very epitome of pyramid scheming. But if the instructor of the online course turns out to be a pedantic ideologue with a specious agenda or a scammer trying to bleed me? Click-off, scroll, next course. Money back. I didn't invest much capital anyway. Probably it was free.

Sure there is some garbage out there. Possibly a lot. But the online courses I've begun to look at (particularly ones taught by industry pros and not academics at a university) seem like they are sharing knowledge with the next cohort of initiates, with the intention of strengthening fields and industries that have not yet run dry. I hope that's the case. The really good courses get numbers of students that a traditional school can't imagine, so that could prove to be a problem very quickly. For now, at any rate, online courses are at least instantly accessible and radically less expensive.  The red brick and mortar universities, with their relationships to student loans, have become like hospitals that drain medicare, medicaid, and health insurance with exaggerated costs and over-billing. It's a feeding frenzy on the gravy train. Hopefully online courses fair well on competition and don't become mass markets for billions of students competing for thousands of jobs.

If nothing else, online learning promises to be a democratic market place where students can credential themselves by virtue of their own drive to succeed, be awarded on their merits from peers and from their own knowledge of the subjects rather than the approval of a committee with its petty agendas and desperate infighting despite all its best intentions and hands-on mentoring.

Don't misunderstand my feelings about college. It was a good ride. But no one ever looks at my transcripts. No one knows I likely have the equivalent in credits of an art history degree. Online studies may actually change that paradigm in the future. Self-credentialing online means I can present my competencies by subject. I can say, Yes I know this. And this. And this, too. But not this. This one doesn't fit my career goals. It's about all the important things I've become competent at, not a degree that titles me. Of course, I'm waxing poetic about studying JavaScript online when, as an undergrad, I drank java while listening to poetry in cafés. These are apples and oranges.

And that may be the most important insight. Online learning outside a degree program means I can learn while engaging directly with the new professional field that interests me. If I need to learn something, I buckle in, knuckle down and learn what is essential to know NOW and start using it NOW. Not five years from now. It feels far more practical. Which makes me wonder why going to college on a campus to gain a liberal arts education ever should have been about a job. Doesn't it make sense to go to college for a few years simply to learn how to think and to get a great background. Isn't that enough? Maybe even figure out your calling as a human beyond that of a worker.

And then, after that, after you graduate, gather the practical knowledge for an income earning job and do the learning online in just a year or two. You know how they announce a shortage in an industry and people run out and get a four-year degree while we suffer four years of shortages in that industry and then suddenly there are too many people in the industry four years later? Let's not do that.

For liberal arts and for my studio art adventures, going to a physical college was great. There was very little hope for employment following the path of literature, poetry, philosophy. But I learned a lot about thinking. Looking back, I am disappointed by how much nonsense was circulating as "thought." But there was a lot of good thought, too. Didn't I lie on the college green reading thousands of pages of Dostoevsky and Kafka and Chekov and Tolstoy and Turgenev?

Yet, going to a college campus in the rolling hills to acquire technical skills that I can market in this new economy, alongside my fine art? I don't see why I don't just sit at the computer and learn that part online.  Especially since self-directed learning suits the entrepreneurial (and creative) spirit better.

This is down-and-dirty day job stuff.

Will it work? Well, let's see.

Looking Back

—Creativity—

I have a couple articles that I have been planning to publish online, on sites for scholars and university professors. I had been thinking about publishing one of them tonight. But I am here, instead, reading old posts.

But that is a good thing, because the writing on this blog is giving me confidence. I don't know if the latest article is good or not. I just finished it and I can't comprehend it clearly. It's too fresh, and I'm buried too deep in it. But by going back and re-reading the posts here, I get a sense that my writing is where I want it to be. So my new article must measure up to my demands for myself. It is probably just as good as the posts here are.

Well, there's nothing profound about seeing the value in looking at old work. I've always thought it is a good idea to turn canvases to the wall, or squirrel drawings away in portfolios and dresser drawers. Given a month or more, one can see them fresh, almost with the eyes of a brand-new viewer, if only for a few seconds.

My mother has given me an old, framed woodblock print. A week or so ago, I hung something in it's place above her kitchen bins and took the print to hang in my room. My brother-in-law noted something about it and so I started looking at it again. It's all about something different, now. It's not about the process or what I struggled with. In a way, it's more about the subject than ever before. The subject is a little barn for a couple goats. The goats aren't in the picture. Back when I made it, it was more about the print than the barn. But now I remember the barn.

But even when I look at the print, I see everything. It is so easy to look at and everything is readable. I no longer (and this took a long time) feel that there are failures here and there in the piece. Everything is just right. My brother-in-law says there is sophistication that I probably don't even notice. But now I am looking for it--to see if I can tell what it is that he sees.

So, looking over these old posts is good. I see that I was right about some things that, in the time that has passed since writing them, have unfolded before me in the ways that I had predicted they would. I see that I was not unreasonable in my assessments of the world of art. And I see that I do, after all, know how to construct a paragraph and a sentence. Or even a well-placed fragment.

How far back can we find artist statements?

—The art world—

I often wonder, when did we first start seeing all this emphasis on artist statements?

Tonight I came across a letter written from Camille Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel. It is dated November 6, 1886 and in it Pissarro writes:

My Dear M. Durand-Ruel, I am sending you the enclosed account of myself and my new artistic doctrines that you requested.

In the letter, Pissarro includes a short artist statement—his artistic doctrines—which he titles Theory. The statement explains his influences, his process, and his philosophy, each in one of three short paragraphs of one to two sentences. It is a model artist statement, even if he didn't call it that.

He follows the statement with a short biography, which he refers to as such. "Here is my biography," he writes. Notably, he focuses on his literal history—where he was born, and where he has worked and traveled prior to his involvement with the Impressionist movement. He doesn't list accomplishments and honors.

So here we have a modern example of the artist statement and artist biography requested by a dealer dating to the late 19th century.

Art and the Internet

More and more it is becoming obvious that one can define him or herself as an expert and develop a presence on the internet. I think we have reached a point where people need to self-credential themselves instead of going for degrees and they have to reach the customer directly instead of going through employers, publishers, distributors, or agents. Teaching and publishing online is definitely a stronger possibility now than traditional career routes.

Backing up

—Tip—

Here's a quick tip for bloggers. If your blog host has a way to export your blog post data, you can download your entire blog to a text or xml file in case something bad happens. I do this regularly with my blog. Everything I've written here is also on my hard drive at home, just in case. I also have my lesson plan posts printed in color and bound in a three-ring binder as a teaching portfolio. I don't expect Google to lose my blog, but you never know.

Building a flying machine

—Creativity—

Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.

Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.

Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird

The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.

Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.

But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.

Process and product

—Creativity—

How we love to tear reality into two pieces and color these pieces as extreme opposites. In art-education parlance, process is on the good side and product is on the bad side—particularly for teaching the youngest artists. But I don't see it this way.

As an art educator, I've seen this dyad at its extremes, and my feeling is that both process and product are equally important, but at their extremes are pretty useless. That's because process should be the way to get to a product. Without a product, process is aimless noodling. Without a process, product is mindless mimicry.

Now, I should immediately define my terms and differentiate my concept of process and product from the way they are conventionally understood. For me, process in art is a series of actions taken to achieve a finished, public artwork. Product is that artwork. I don't practice or teach art as an isolated personal activity performed entirely for one's own enjoyment. That might be part of it, but in my thinking, art is communication and that involves a work that is finished and then shared through display. This is just one approach, but I believe it works. As a counterexample to my uses of process and product, I offer a couple ways I've seen other teachers focus exclusively on one or the other, to my horror and, I believe, to the disservice of the student. I admit these are extremes, but I was there and I was required to participate.

Picture the creative arts day care that favors process. These teachers see process as experimentation. Children's self-esteem requires that they direct their own activity and the important thing is that we give them room and freedom to explore their materials. For example, we will remove most of their clothing and let them get paint and other materials all over their bodies. They can scramble all over huge sheets of paper together in collaboration. They won't take the result home, but I have them hang it in their class space to share. We let them discover by experience how paint feels, how it sticks, how it smears and mixes. Some of the materials we give them won't make conventional art. We foam them up from head to foot with shaving cream and let them explore tactile qualities knowing that it is impossible to make any product of it. We let them build sculptures and knock them down again and again.

None of this is without value and some of it is essential. But what is missing is the sense that, ultimately, art is about communicating with other people through display. I don't believe it is harmful to start teaching this early. If a child is old enough for art, he or she is old enough to conceive of process as leading to a conclusion, regardless of how permanent or public it is. An extreme concept of process favors a particularly contemporary attitude of instant gratification and self-indulgence that is not really in tune with art-making. At an extreme, it completely ignores the existence of rules in art, natural or human-made and misses the point of communication. The only argument I can see for this type of process-oriented pedagogy is that it is age-appropriate for very young children. I disagree entirely with that argument, however, and later in the post I will offer an example from my own childhood to argue against a pedagogy that favors process to the exclusion of product.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let's look at the most problematic kind of product-oriented pedagogy I've seen. We've all experienced the activity that starts with a paper plate in front of every chair filled with an array of pieces of construction paper, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, and tongue depressors. Some of the pieces are traced out and cut in advance by the teacher. This is the enemy that process-oriented educators see when we utter the word product. But this is an extreme way of teaching art, however common it is. Look at what we start with: every seat has the exact same array of objects, down to the same colors. The object of this game is for every student to carefully follow the directions that result in a complete object that Mom will love to put on the refrigerator. It is extremely important for every child to write his or her name neatly on the finished project. This is because the child will hardly be able to tell their's from the other children's, or even if they can, the teacher won't be able to.

But what are these kids signing off on when they lay that signature down? Forcing a child to take authorship for something he or she didn't really create is only half an art activity and yet people love to do this. Some people will explain that it's the best way to teach little children, saving more creativity for adult classes. The only argument I can conceive of for this type of product-oriented pedagogy is that it teaches the student to take concrete steps and that there needs to be a process to follow in order to accomplish something. But I disagree entirely with that argument (and I imagine more sinister or at least lazy reasons for the activity, anyway). And now it's time to share an example from my own childhood to argue for a pedagogy of process and product that utilizes a balance of individual creativity, teacher-directed rules, personal preference, and a concrete audience.

When I was a child, we had a holiday tradition in our home that has affected me greatly as an artist. Every year, in those days, we would receive scores of Christmas cards from friends and family and at the end of the season the used cards went in a box for the next year. A month or so before Christmas, we would excavate this box and another box of supplies and tackle the annual ritual of making hand-made Christmas cards for our own recipients out of recycled commercial holiday cards. The trick was to cut out words and pictures from the old cards and rearrange them into our own unique creations. Part of the fun was picking the cards to start with. Looking through the old cards, one was able to imagine possibilities and try them out. We had to share diplomatically since we would all end up with unique material to work with. In the event that there were duplicate cards, two of us could come up with unique responses to the same material. This is another interesting difference between our experience and the extremes I cited above: our experience reinforced group dynamics, while the first two extreme examples I related offer little development in collaborative skills.

Mom had showed us several methods that we all used. First of all, we had a way of folding and gluing a sheet of construction paper into a card. Secondly, we employed a method of gluing glitter. We also had a formula for making an envelope out of more construction paper. I'm sure we had other tricks of the trade that Mom had learned herself or had invented, and the kids probably came up with some tricks of our own. The cutting up of old cards involved pretty universal methods for cutting—although one of us is left-handed—but the way we extracted the images from the cards was all our own. Mom gave us no rules for how we composed our creations, other than that they had to be mailable.

This yearly project was a perfect recipe for teaching creativity. We had a process that was open-ended to an extent, but had the kinds of limitations that help us focus and problem-solve. We had some rules to follow and freedom to imagine our own creations, too. And we returned to this project again and again, through two decades of our collective childhoods. To this day, I am convinced that my creative process is informed by these early experiences every Christmas. From a very early age, I created product with my family and it didn't hurt me one bit.

Product is an essential conclusion to the creative process. When we made these Christmas cards, one of the foremost thoughts in our minds was about how the recipients would view them. Audience was an essential element of the process because, as we created, we played the role of the recipient in our minds as we played the role of the artist with our hands and eyes. Children love to share their art with others. In fact, they hardly have any interest in keeping it for themselves until they are older. This supports the idea that young children are more concerned with process, even as it supports the conclusion that children practice communication through the sharing of meaningful visual objects.

Some teachers will use modern artists as examples of process over product, which simply isn't true. Picasso and Van Gogh were extremely serious about their products and it is a misconception that their art is entirely personal and lacks academic convention. Where would anyone get such an idea if they were really looking at the art by these artists? And yet I just saw a show of Van Gogh's work in which the wall text exclaimed surprise at the careful compositions where a fury of emotional activity was expected! What damage have we've done to our ideas of creativity through our collective conceit of process as wild emotion? We value personal expression. This is fine. But the idea of process as loose emotion that we've shamelessly projected back upon the earlier modernists (let alone the later ones with the moniker Abstract Expressionist) is one that some educators now impose unquestioningly upon our children in the names of freedom and self-expression.

We live in a world in which most people survive, somehow, with little understanding of process. I encounter this all the time. Adults don't understand how most things work, they don't understand the steps required to accomplish things, and they constantly miss the big picture. We aren't doing people favors teaching them that process is a self-absorbed activity that has nothing to do with other people or with a successful product, let alone composition. But we also live in a very conventional society that, for all its emphasis on self-interest, doesn't reward those who leave the path we've beaten down into quagmire. We aren't doing people any favors if we don't teach that personal creativity is part of a social equation.

Depth in meaning cannot come about from pure process. Engaging in process alone won't require that others (or even the artist) understand it. And an uncreative product, devoid of a personal method, also has no depth of meaning because it just reiterates the same tired clichés. Only through a balance of convention and personal expression can deeper meaning be constructed and shared. This is essential, I believe, for the best art education as I practice it just as it is essential for my practice of art making.