This virtual space is an extension of AEAH 3770 Computer Art Applications and will be used to record class discussions and ongoing conservations relating to the course.
The technological barrier I seem to constantly be facing is laptops being extremely fragile now that technology has advanced to the point of tiny computers. I am currently on my fifth laptop since I began college, and the frequency with which I am buying replacements seems to be exponentially increasing. For example, my most recent laptop is smaller than a textbook. It was bought to replace a slightly bigger netbook, which was stepped on by a friend's parent and destroyed only a few months ago. That netbook was only five months old itself, and had been bought to replace my older laptop (regular size), which had the screen fall off of it due to overuse and poor hinges. That one was less than a year old as well. It seems that as technology advances, the items themselves get smaller. And much less durable.
I have the exact same problem with phones. I've gone through four phones in the last year because of silly accidents. I really do hope that this is an issue that is addressed by future designers for various technologies accessed by the average person!
Yessss I'm an apple freak, and Cody works for apple. But I'm a firm believer ! My olddd laptop is still like new...and their customer service is bomb, they pretty much help you as much as they can for free before charging you. Yeah, it's expensive, but worth it, maybe... one day :D
My technology barrier that i had while i was in High school and even while i have been at UNT was that i was usually the tech support help in the class. In high school, my art teacher and all my other teachers would always have trouble setting up the projector and power points. I would try to show them how to do it so that next time they could fix it really fast and they can move on from the problem, but they never listened to me. So almost everyday i would help out at least one teacher with their lesson. I even had a teacher scoff at me and tell me i had no idea what was doing.
For real! My favorite, though, was when projectors were new. Nooooone knew how to make the computer screen go to the projector, even after months/years had gone by with projectors in every classroom.
Hahahaha that's so true. I'm pretty sure I've helped teachers find ON buttons on computers.... I make fun of that....but I can admit to learning how to work a flash drive just last year. They used to baffle me. Haha
I have always considered myself as someone who was fairly in touch with technology but not a "techie" by any means. One barrier that comes in mind was when I bought an iPhone for the first time. I never spent much time using it and essentially used it for calling, texting, and checking e-mail. One day my niece (who at the time was six) picked up my phone and began showing me how several different settings worked and gave me advice on the best apps to download. Most of the things I had never heard of! At first, it was almost like an ego issue that I had been "shown up" by a six year old. Later after reassessing the situation, it made much more sense. Her parents had iPads, computers, etc. that she had access to as toys. Even in Kindergarden she was taking a typing class and did most of her work on iPads to cut down paper waste. It was a great reminder to stay on top to the trends so that I'm not left behind in the classroom!
This has happened to me with my students at an after school program that I work at. My coworker received a kindle fire for Christmas and didn't know how to change the brightness of the screen. With out even looking up from his book or seeing the Kindle our student explained how he needed to click on the battery area and hold down to have the setup window pop up. That is where we should change it. He didn't even have to have the tablet in front of him and he knew how to fix it. Crazy!
Until 10th grade, a technology barrier was never really 'existent' ... I went to school at a pretty wealthy and large school district. I recall using digital cameras starting in 4th grade, I thought I was soooo cool walking around school with a camera snapping pics for my art class. Ever since 4th grade technology use would progressively increase. Mainly using digital cameras...but of better quality (example in 4th grade we were using a point and shoot....as I got older we were using a dslr's) and pretty basic photoshop. When I went to a different school district (VERY close to the previous one, but much smaller) we had less computers, cameras, and majority of my friends elective choices were band...or choir...so the 'importance' of art wasn't seen so much here. Although I missed the old ways... I perfected, literally, perfected the 'other side' of my artsy side. We got to throw on the pottery wheel, paint, dye fabric, draw self portraits, work 2D and 3D ... It was amazing, eye opening, and brought me to the point I'm at now because those days were so inspiring to me. A barrier at this school was just the fact that it was such a smaller district (there was only 1 high school versus the previous districts at least 10 high schools).... I also had an older lady at the new school-- being more experienced in what we did in comparison to young teachers that had come in with more experience and knowledge.
So really, technology in general was a barrier in your art education. That's so interesting that we are in a class that is promoting the use of technology. I think we just definitely use a combination of techniques to balance everything out.
A few years ago at my high school, my anatomy and physiology class were doing presentations on the systems in the body. My teacher was a very cool teacher, she gave us the option to do an animation instead of a PowerPoint. Most if not all students in the class wanted to do an animation. However, there were hundreds of students that were doing this project, although we had access to computers and these programs. Our school did not have enough computers for everyone to use. We did not have the necessary technology resources in order to complete the assignment. Many students resorted to using a website where you just had to put in a script. Many of the presentations were not up to par to where we would have liked it to be. A lot of us had to bring in our own computers and use trial software in order to complete the assignment, but even then when we would be progressing in the assignment, the software would erase our assignments.
When I was in third grade we had two teachers that were assigned to our class. One taught math and science and the other taught Reading and Writing. At that point our school had one lab that the school shared through all the grades. My third grade Science and Math teacher made sure that we had specific assignments that included word, powerpoint and other Microsoft applications so that we could learn how to use them. We had a typing class, but we did not have a lab class that was dedicated to actual applications, so she found it necessary to include them in here curriculum. I'm glad she did because by the end of that year I understood the program better than my own mother. This eventually helped me with classes in high school and middle school, and this way I didn't spend my time having to learn the basic skills of these programs. The Barrier that I face is that no other teacher actually spent the time to teach us these skills. My high school BCIS teacher didn't even know how to do many common tasks on word and had been teaching the class for 5 years. Other's in that class didn't know as much and I ended up teaching others instead of the actual teacher. That is frustrating because they didn't have that opportunity to learn and it's not their fault.
I find myself too dependent on technology. My grandmother still tells me to look up in the dictionary when I need to know how to spell or define a word verses using dictionary.com. Well my dad still uses a map. My dad lives in Mississippi,before returning back to school he highlighted the route for me to travel back to school in Arkansas. Naturally I tell him that I have google maps on my phone so I don't need the map. He still made me take it even though I had the internet at my finger tips. Welp knowing my lucky the route back to school is just a bunch of trees on a single lane road. My service goes out and I find myself lost not knowing where I am looking at the stupid map with the blinking blue dot going haywire. I couldn't even get texts. Lucky for me dad made me take the map and found my way back to civilization. I could have been stranded...Yikes!
I still print off google map directions even though I have a smart phone just incase something like that happens to me. I tape it to my dash board and I'm set.
I print off maps and bring them with me because I still don't trust my GPS for the reason that something could malfunction and I would be completely lost.
I got my first laptop the summer before my freshman year of college, I thought I had picked out a pretty good one, it had pretty good reviews but it was released only a few months before. I got to school and was noticing a few problems here and there with my computer, nothing I thought I needed to worry about. Within the first two months of school I got a virus on it from the internet connection I was using at the dorms and my virus protection didn't help. I got it fixed and brought it back to school. Then I started getting this blue screen every few days that said my computer needed to be shut down or else. I could tell it was taking a toll on my computer so I took it in again, they said they "fixed it". But a month later my computer would shut itself off and then would not allow me to get into my own profile where all my work was saved. It was right before finals and I had already started writing my papers, that all disappeared and I couldn't get them back. I lost everything saved to my computer and I learned my lesson to back everything up to a second source. The barrier is that technology doesn't always work when or how we want it to and that we can't always be so dependent on it.
That happened to me! Exactly. Teacher extended the deadline on my paper and reminded me how important it was not to depend on technology and back things up, etc. Then when IT gave me my computer back they kindly let me know that they had decided to reformat. I lost everything. :( An entire week's worth of work and semester of notes, GONE!
My favorite thing to read in high school was Thrasher Magazine. It had the best skateboarding pics, interviews, art and music reviews. It was a lot edgier too, unlike the other magazines at the time which were filled with mostly advertisements. When I finally got the internet I frequented their website every day. They had a tab on there that said "Forget homework, go skateboard" or something similar. The link would take you to hundreds of book reports. I never had to read the popular titles that were assigned to most high school students. My school didn't upload essays to that plagiarism program, I don't even know if it was around back then, so I wouldn't even have to retype them. I would just hit print the morning before school. Whoever typed up the essays at the magazine did a great job of making it seem like a high schooler wrote it, there were plenty of misspellings and gramatical errors. At the time I thought it was awesome and super punk of them. They were giving me more time to skate and also getting me a decent grade. Now that I'm older I feel like I cheated myself out of some of those classics.
Ha! That’s funny because I would have never thought to look up an essay on the internet for an assignment. That’s very clever however cleverness used wrongly. Those plagiarism websites are no joke. Now days if your caught plagiarizing it’s a serious offense. I knew a guy that decided to try and do that but his paper was given the zero and reported to the office. It was a big deal. Needless to say I started to take plagiarizing seriously.
Other than my time-consuming addiction to all puzzle and word-game apps on my phone, the biggest technology barrier I've experienced was dealing with the overwhelming girth of my previous laptop. When I first came up here in 2009, my parents bought me a beautiful hp laptop so that I could better do my "art stuff" and take (endless) art history notes. The only problems with those intentions were that one, I've never done my "art stuff" using a computer, and two, the thing was so huge that it didn't fit in any of my backpacks and pulled weird back muscles every time I had to carry it for any extended period of time.. therefore it's only role in my life was to serve as a desktop to watch 30 Rock as I fell asleep. Thankfully this past Christmas I got a macbook pro.. that I still can't really navigate.
The big technology barrier I face is the complication between my Mac and Blackboard that seems to happen when I try and open documents teacher's post. I have to carve out time during the week to get into the lab to either print the files or save them onto my flash-drive (if the teacher doesn't kindly put them in PDF and .doc format). It amazes me at how dependent the teachers are on this system working... and it is temperamental technology. So if you don't let them know ahead of time, they think you were irresponsible and waited right before it was due, etc. And then it's a big awkward mess!
Ps. I also lived through a technology barrier with this blog and my blogger/gmail account! I had to deactivate and reactivate it with the help of some technology dude on the phone laughing at me. AWESOME!
The technological barrier I seem to constantly be facing is laptops being extremely fragile now that technology has advanced to the point of tiny computers. I am currently on my fifth laptop since I began college, and the frequency with which I am buying replacements seems to be exponentially increasing. For example, my most recent laptop is smaller than a textbook. It was bought to replace a slightly bigger netbook, which was stepped on by a friend's parent and destroyed only a few months ago. That netbook was only five months old itself, and had been bought to replace my older laptop (regular size), which had the screen fall off of it due to overuse and poor hinges. That one was less than a year old as well. It seems that as technology advances, the items themselves get smaller. And much less durable.
ReplyDeleteplease get an army laptop.
DeleteI have the exact same problem with phones. I've gone through four phones in the last year because of silly accidents. I really do hope that this is an issue that is addressed by future designers for various technologies accessed by the average person!
DeleteYessss I'm an apple freak, and Cody works for apple. But I'm a firm believer ! My olddd laptop is still like new...and their customer service is bomb, they pretty much help you as much as they can for free before charging you. Yeah, it's expensive, but worth it, maybe... one day :D
DeleteMy technology barrier that i had while i was in High school and even while i have been at UNT was that i was usually the tech support help in the class. In high school, my art teacher and all my other teachers would always have trouble setting up the projector and power points. I would try to show them how to do it so that next time they could fix it really fast and they can move on from the problem, but they never listened to me. So almost everyday i would help out at least one teacher with their lesson. I even had a teacher scoff at me and tell me i had no idea what was doing.
ReplyDeleteFor real! My favorite, though, was when projectors were new. Nooooone knew how to make the computer screen go to the projector, even after months/years had gone by with projectors in every classroom.
DeleteHahahaha that's so true. I'm pretty sure I've helped teachers find ON buttons on computers.... I make fun of that....but I can admit to learning how to work a flash drive just last year. They used to baffle me. Haha
DeleteI have always considered myself as someone who was fairly in touch with technology but not a "techie" by any means. One barrier that comes in mind was when I bought an iPhone for the first time. I never spent much time using it and essentially used it for calling, texting, and checking e-mail. One day my niece (who at the time was six) picked up my phone and began showing me how several different settings worked and gave me advice on the best apps to download. Most of the things I had never heard of! At first, it was almost like an ego issue that I had been "shown up" by a six year old. Later after reassessing the situation, it made much more sense. Her parents had iPads, computers, etc. that she had access to as toys. Even in Kindergarden she was taking a typing class and did most of her work on iPads to cut down paper waste. It was a great reminder to stay on top to the trends so that I'm not left behind in the classroom!
ReplyDeleteThis has happened to me with my students at an after school program that I work at. My coworker received a kindle fire for Christmas and didn't know how to change the brightness of the screen. With out even looking up from his book or seeing the Kindle our student explained how he needed to click on the battery area and hold down to have the setup window pop up. That is where we should change it. He didn't even have to have the tablet in front of him and he knew how to fix it. Crazy!
DeleteUntil 10th grade, a technology barrier was never really 'existent' ... I went to school at a pretty wealthy and large school district. I recall using digital cameras starting in 4th grade, I thought I was soooo cool walking around school with a camera snapping pics for my art class. Ever since 4th grade technology use would progressively increase. Mainly using digital cameras...but of better quality (example in 4th grade we were using a point and shoot....as I got older we were using a dslr's) and pretty basic photoshop. When I went to a different school district (VERY close to the previous one, but much smaller) we had less computers, cameras, and majority of my friends elective choices were band...or choir...so the 'importance' of art wasn't seen so much here. Although I missed the old ways... I perfected, literally, perfected the 'other side' of my artsy side. We got to throw on the pottery wheel, paint, dye fabric, draw self portraits, work 2D and 3D ... It was amazing, eye opening, and brought me to the point I'm at now because those days were so inspiring to me. A barrier at this school was just the fact that it was such a smaller district (there was only 1 high school versus the previous districts at least 10 high schools).... I also had an older lady at the new school-- being more experienced in what we did in comparison to young teachers that had come in with more experience and knowledge.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe barriers are actually kind of benefiting you here. Stepping back from tech seemed to make you push your options. :)
DeleteSo really, technology in general was a barrier in your art education. That's so interesting that we are in a class that is promoting the use of technology. I think we just definitely use a combination of techniques to balance everything out.
DeleteExactly....the balance was perfect. That way I wasn't like, 'lost', in the tech world. But I was able to experience the best of both 'art worlds'
DeleteA few years ago at my high school, my anatomy and physiology class were doing presentations on the systems in the body. My teacher was a very cool teacher, she gave us the option to do an animation instead of a PowerPoint. Most if not all students in the class wanted to do an animation. However, there were hundreds of students that were doing this project, although we had access to computers and these programs. Our school did not have enough computers for everyone to use. We did not have the necessary technology resources in order to complete the assignment. Many students resorted to using a website where you just had to put in a script. Many of the presentations were not up to par to where we would have liked it to be. A lot of us had to bring in our own computers and use trial software in order to complete the assignment, but even then when we would be progressing in the assignment, the software would erase our assignments.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in third grade we had two teachers that were assigned to our class. One taught math and science and the other taught Reading and Writing. At that point our school had one lab that the school shared through all the grades. My third grade Science and Math teacher made sure that we had specific assignments that included word, powerpoint and other Microsoft applications so that we could learn how to use them. We had a typing class, but we did not have a lab class that was dedicated to actual applications, so she found it necessary to include them in here curriculum. I'm glad she did because by the end of that year I understood the program better than my own mother. This eventually helped me with classes in high school and middle school, and this way I didn't spend my time having to learn the basic skills of these programs. The Barrier that I face is that no other teacher actually spent the time to teach us these skills. My high school BCIS teacher didn't even know how to do many common tasks on word and had been teaching the class for 5 years. Other's in that class didn't know as much and I ended up teaching others instead of the actual teacher. That is frustrating because they didn't have that opportunity to learn and it's not their fault.
ReplyDeleteI find myself too dependent on technology. My grandmother still tells me to look up in the dictionary when I need to know how to spell or define a word verses using dictionary.com. Well my dad still uses a map. My dad lives in Mississippi,before returning back to school he highlighted the route for me to travel back to school in Arkansas. Naturally I tell him that I have google maps on my phone so I don't need the map. He still made me take it even though I had the internet at my finger tips. Welp knowing my lucky the route back to school is just a bunch of trees on a single lane road. My service goes out and I find myself lost not knowing where I am looking at the stupid map with the blinking blue dot going haywire. I couldn't even get texts. Lucky for me dad made me take the map and found my way back to civilization. I could have been stranded...Yikes!
ReplyDeleteI still print off google map directions even though I have a smart phone just incase something like that happens to me. I tape it to my dash board and I'm set.
DeleteYea I've resorted to google maps for long trips.
DeleteI print off maps and bring them with me because I still don't trust my GPS for the reason that something could malfunction and I would be completely lost.
DeleteI got my first laptop the summer before my freshman year of college, I thought I had picked out a pretty good one, it had pretty good reviews but it was released only a few months before. I got to school and was noticing a few problems here and there with my computer, nothing I thought I needed to worry about. Within the first two months of school I got a virus on it from the internet connection I was using at the dorms and my virus protection didn't help. I got it fixed and brought it back to school. Then I started getting this blue screen every few days that said my computer needed to be shut down or else. I could tell it was taking a toll on my computer so I took it in again, they said they "fixed it". But a month later my computer would shut itself off and then would not allow me to get into my own profile where all my work was saved. It was right before finals and I had already started writing my papers, that all disappeared and I couldn't get them back. I lost everything saved to my computer and I learned my lesson to back everything up to a second source. The barrier is that technology doesn't always work when or how we want it to and that we can't always be so dependent on it.
ReplyDeleteThat happened to me! Exactly. Teacher extended the deadline on my paper and reminded me how important it was not to depend on technology and back things up, etc. Then when IT gave me my computer back they kindly let me know that they had decided to reformat. I lost everything. :( An entire week's worth of work and semester of notes, GONE!
DeleteMy favorite thing to read in high school was Thrasher Magazine. It had the best skateboarding pics, interviews, art and music reviews. It was a lot edgier too, unlike the other magazines at the time which were filled with mostly advertisements. When I finally got the internet I frequented their website every day. They had a tab on there that said "Forget homework, go skateboard" or something similar. The link would take you to hundreds of book reports. I never had to read the popular titles that were assigned to most high school students. My school didn't upload essays to that plagiarism program, I don't even know if it was around back then, so I wouldn't even have to retype them. I would just hit print the morning before school. Whoever typed up the essays at the magazine did a great job of making it seem like a high schooler wrote it, there were plenty of misspellings and gramatical errors. At the time I thought it was awesome and super punk of them. They were giving me more time to skate and also getting me a decent grade. Now that I'm older I feel like I cheated myself out of some of those classics.
ReplyDeleteHa! That’s funny because I would have never thought to look up an essay on the internet for an assignment. That’s very clever however cleverness used wrongly. Those plagiarism websites are no joke. Now days if your caught plagiarizing it’s a serious offense. I knew a guy that decided to try and do that but his paper was given the zero and reported to the office. It was a big deal. Needless to say I started to take plagiarizing seriously.
DeleteOther than my time-consuming addiction to all puzzle and word-game apps on my phone, the biggest technology barrier I've experienced was dealing with the overwhelming girth of my previous laptop. When I first came up here in 2009, my parents bought me a beautiful hp laptop so that I could better do my "art stuff" and take (endless) art history notes. The only problems with those intentions were that one, I've never done my "art stuff" using a computer, and two, the thing was so huge that it didn't fit in any of my backpacks and pulled weird back muscles every time I had to carry it for any extended period of time.. therefore it's only role in my life was to serve as a desktop to watch 30 Rock as I fell asleep. Thankfully this past Christmas I got a macbook pro.. that I still can't really navigate.
ReplyDeleteThe big technology barrier I face is the complication between my Mac and Blackboard that seems to happen when I try and open documents teacher's post. I have to carve out time during the week to get into the lab to either print the files or save them onto my flash-drive (if the teacher doesn't kindly put them in PDF and .doc format).
ReplyDeleteIt amazes me at how dependent the teachers are on this system working... and it is temperamental technology. So if you don't let them know ahead of time, they think you were irresponsible and waited right before it was due, etc. And then it's a big awkward mess!
Ps. I also lived through a technology barrier with this blog and my blogger/gmail account! I had to deactivate and reactivate it with the help of some technology dude on the phone laughing at me. AWESOME!