In response to CAPE

While I feel that arts integration learning is a realistic way of incorporating arts into schools in the time of changing (declining) budgets, I think it is important to ask What is the difference/is there a difference in teaching through the arts vs. about the arts? Do arts have their own meaningful goals that are necessary to education or is art a tool that is used to research and discover?

Citizenville

Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government

http://pdfdownload.me/citizenville-how-to-take-the-town-square-digital-and-reinvent-government

Using the internet to connect to government: Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick is using live chat sessions to discuss city concerns

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/03/live_chat_with_portland_city_c.html

Museum 2.0

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com

This is the most interesting blog I have visited in a while. I found every post to be very relevant and exciting! This may be evident in the amount of exclamation marks found on this page.
While blog post topics were diverse, the posts held some good-feeling, meaty info on Museum Ed. Because I am very interested in museums as places of discussion, education and conversation instigators in the community, this website was very helpful to me. There was so much great feeling as the blog emphasizes, considers, and talks about how to support things that I see as strengths of museums (interactivity, participation, diversity, alternative/imaginative formats, collaboration, education)- and also emphasizes critical thought and restructuring of things that I think are weaknesses of museums (the opposite of the last list). The website even encourages participation and interactivity with questions at the end of posts.

I was particularly drawn to this group that was sited on the website:

C3- The Creative Community Committee
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html

C3 is a group that meets bi-monthly/quarterly for specific brainstorming sessions that aims at a "community first" approach to program development. This is really neat and makes so much sense :)

Three goals that they shoot for with this structure are to:
1. internally, clearly articulate our programmatic goals and assess our plans against those goals.
2. externally, invite people with diverse backgrounds and connections throughout the County to help us understand their needs and brainstorm creative approaches to fulfilling them
3. sensibly balance the responsibilities and time commitment of staff and community members to the development process




How else to aim for relevant and needed programming than to aim to listen and include as many voices as possible in the programming process? LOVE!

StockyardInstitute

http://www.stockyardinstitute.org/
 
"Stockyard Institute is a Chicago-based artistic and pedagogical collective whose practices center on a variety of issues concerning youth, Chicago, visual art, community, and social knowledge."

Overall I really enjoyed reading about the many many amazing and wonderful art and ed projects going on in the Chicago area- I am floored. While clicking through the website I became (actually) a little overwhelmed by the amount of other organizations who do similarly great things- I would be interested in a site that might act as a forum for the many fantastic organizations around town to communicate with each other and find ways to work/help each other's causes.

Seeing websites such as this one make me excited about the many places and activities I would like to get involved in but don't have time to because I am busy with school.  I can't help but feel like since being in school I've been really disconnected from being involved in the neighborhood I live in and from organizations that interest me. These are things I appreciated about projects on the Stockyard Institute site.

RWM MACBA

http://rwm.macba.cat/en/variations_tag/

An excellent podcast on appropriation, sound, music, collage, history, libraries, and more!

VARIATIONS #6

The Library

Conjunction Junction What's Your Function?

http://artjunction.org/blog/

I found Art Junction to be a delightful sight about art, education, and broadly- culture. I enjoyed the layout of the site- the simplicity, clean design, appropriate uses of color- the side bar is not too congested and feels very useful.

As a blog, I felt that Art Junction made me feel curious about points of access. How much information or what type of information is just right to grab people's attention and invite him/her to read more? Or, similarly, how much information is just enough to know that the article may not be of interest to the viewer. Art Junction uses large and attractive photographs, a title, and a quick blurb about each entry. I found this to be just the right amount of information to draw me into articles without congesting the format of the page.

I have been playing with trying to post photos on my blog as points of access but I am finding that having a more clear format and maybe some sort of blurb may be helpful...

I stole this from the Art Junction website in hopes that someone might like it enough to look at this page.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The MCA's website is clean. Though there is nothing flashy about the website I think it looks contemporary and design-y, maybe it is because of the black/white/grey scheme, the sans serif fonts, the  minimal blocks of text and information... I'm a little unsure of where my perception of graphic design-y stems from or why I feel that graphic design-y conveys a contemporary feeling.
What interests me is the feeling of this website in comparison with the website of the Art Institute of Chicago. These websites portray two very different identities. While the AIC's site has contemporary qualities to it, I feel that the cleanliness of the MCA's site portrays a freshness that is in-line with the idea of what a contemporary art museum should be, rife with fresh ideas.

I think the MCA's website is well laid out and I appreciate the simplicity of the site given how much information is actually on the site. I think the double navigation bars at the top of the page are great for creating clear and clean organization. I also appreciate that events and items of information are conveyed primarily with an image (see for example, the exhibitions page in which each exhibition is categorized with a med size photo and a small caption at the bottom). This is a little bit of a contrast from AIC's website in which there are many arbitrary photos that are almost like a decoration to the word content of the page.