What is Art

When I was little I thought art was a perfectly drawn picture (hmmm what does that really mean?).  I was not an artist (at least in my mind) and was continually encouraged by my art teacher to keep working at it.  There was no room for the word can't in his classroom.  To this day I have a large clown charcoal drawing I completed, which at the time I felt was the perfect picture I had dreamed of.  My view on art has changed and with this digital storytelling course is already changing again.

As a parent I now see art in anything my childern create.  In their younger years it was a smear of paint across a piece of paper, in Kindergarten it was the flip flop stepping stone I still have in my flower garden, today it is a freeskate program my daughter performs on the ice wearing a skating dress I designed and sewed for her

or a new model railroad layout my son is working on.

Today I am still not an artist, but I strive to become creative and find it challenging.

After watching and listening to clips in this unit I see my narrow view of art when I was younger.  I now see art connecting and transforming to ones environment.  As the connections are made your imagination grows. I see this imagination leading to a slow hunch or a little hunch and it grows to a bigger hunch.  They then collide and become an idea.  Ideas are only limited by ones imagination; however, without a space to nurture imagination it is difficult for a creative environment to grow.

Venturing to new ground

Last week I took the leap and decided to jump into DS106 an open, "headless" course on digital storytelling. A good friend and amazing mentor, Beth Dailey, inspired me to think deeper and learn more about storytelling as an instructional strategy.  With my interest in instructional technology the mix of technology and storytelling brought me to the want to explore digital storytelling.

I am working through Unit 1: Bootcamp this week and will post my reflections later in the week, but I just completed my first daily create and wanted to share.  I selected one at random and  I was assigned to write a poem and tweet it at 11:00 am.  Well I did not complete it on the exact day since it was random, but I did write a 140 character or less poem and tweet it.

Here is my Tweet.

Thinking spring is one its way, but Mother Nautre says no way. Snow predicted for another day. 7-11 inches on its way. #ds106dc
— Penny Kuckkahn (@pkuckkahn) April 15, 2014

Digital Storytelling Open Course Experiment

I am venturing into new ground - digging into what digital storytelling really is while using a fully open course on the web.