I Wish I Still Had Netflix

In an attempt at a little levity (my blogs have been very dry and academic), I'm starting with the title: it refers to the connection made between how RSS works and Netflix vs the video store.In fact, I cancelled my Netflix when I started back to school, and truly I miss the convenience. This is a great sequey into the RSS application. It really does seem simple and direct and extremely useful for the unorganized type (like me). Some ways I thought RSS might be useful for art students could be to subscribe to the NYTimes and the LATimes for current information on the gallery scenes in their respective cities. It's really time consuming to read all of the newspapers and keep up with the current art scene. RollingStone is another subscription that would be useful for them. In this way, the students could work from a common ground in terms of researching current exhibitions and artists. It would cut down the time for the teacher to present the material and for the student, all the information could be accessed from their computers and they would all be receiving the same material. Another application would be for the students to subscribe to each others blogs in which they would be writing about art-related topics. The students could receive each others thoughts automatically. In that way the student learns from others in the class, through blogging, the way a critique would function in a class: a collective discussion about an artist, article or event/artwork. This would be great for a Criticism class.

I picked diigo.co for no reason and my address is http://www.diigo.com/user/carol12345.

Some thoughts about Excel. I'm still a novice at this program and I had a little trouble coming up with ideas/applications for Excel and the art student. Here goes:

1. The student would make a list of color names, then make a list of titles of paintings within a certain style (Pop Art or Impressionism). Then check the boxes that correspond to the colors found in each painting. Add up the colors and discuss the color range within each style of art.

2. The students could organize a random list of paintings from a museum into art style categories to determine the museum focus.

3. The student would use the graph function to make a random linear graph that would correspond to a horizon line or mountain. By plotting numbers on the graph, making a new series for each new image or shape, the student could create a simplistic picture exploring front to back, overlap and scale.

4. Pick a room in a museum, like the Native American room in the Reading Public Museum and categorize the items found there, for instance utilitarian, clothing, decorative or religious. Use the data to to discuss the lives of the people and create a day-in-the-life model based on the distribution of the data.

5. This one is tricky: It uses ranges of numbers or conditions, like equal to or less than, to create colors in a field or a block on the spreadsheet. Once the first color is established, then by selecting boxes in the field, and then put a number in, the second and third colors can be added making a "painting with numbers".

6. Extra credit: I found out by talking to someone at the busstop that pictures can be imported into Excel. This can be used as a way of having fun by stretching the picture.