Thanksgiving to Christo, Jeanne-Claude and Chihuly

Dale Chihuly: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DaleChihuly.jpg

This year I’m giving thanks to three of my creative heroes: Dale Chihuly and the team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

To me, they are icons of  life, color and the creative spirit. They are visionaries that create landscape-scale global community art. Their creative visions are simple and yet incredibly bold in their scale and barriers to implementation.

Creating their work requires the ability to enroll others in their vision, years of advocating and planning,  working effectively with a multitude of technical teams, managing diverse stakeholders, overcoming inertia and fear, taking risks of all kinds, and maintaining the tenacity to stay true to their vision.

They are my heroes – not just my favorite artists. And, they are doing incredible work right now.

Chihuly has proposed an installation at Seattle Center that will create spectacular glowing buildings of pure color and light.

Christo has proposed covering a 42-mile section of the Arkansas River – incredibly beautiful – called “Over the River.” There’s a great video, part of the life celebration service for Jeanne-Claude last year, that shows how they do their work – the frustration and the love.

Thank you Jeanne-Claude, Christo and Chihuly!

Artistic Journey: The Red Rocks Painting

Just a couple of weeks ago I visited Colorado Springs’ Garden of the Gods. The huge shapes are striking with their textures and glowing colors. My snap-and-shoot photos just couldn’t capture the experience. I’d love to return with a great camera at sunrise!

Last weekend, I tried to capture the energy and the color in a painting. I used the texture techniques that I learned from Gregg Analla in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the workshop, we did a layer of color first (far left) that would show through the texture. Then, we made a mixture of sand and acrylic medium and applied it over the base color (middle). We scratched through the sand layer to show the color underneath. After all of that was baked in the New Mexico sun to dry, we sewed, stapled and glued different materials on the canvas and applied different tones of paint to play up the textures.

Base Layer

Texture Layer

To paint the Red Rocks, I used a similar technique. First a layer of shapes and color that would peek through the texture (this is drying outside in the driveway).

Red Rocks base layer

Second, a layer of texture. This was a mixture of acrylic mediums – no sand in this one. I used a transparent pink tone in the medium to see if it would glow under the paint later on.

Red Rocks texture layer

And the finished work:

Red Rocks by C. Geith 2010

Kiva Painting

This small work was one of my first attempts at incorporating yarn and string into the canvas.

 

Kiva by C. Geith 2010

 

The Living Wing or ‘Ode to the Oil Spill’

This is my most recent painting from the Goddess Wing Series. My Mom immediately thought of the gulf oil spill when she saw it. Some people see a woman’s face in the big deep blue section, others feel a portal in that section.

Living Wing by C. Geith 2010

Another Goddess Wing

In February 2010 I painted this wing segment.  The tiny sections of a pink grapefruit with the light behind it inspired the top section of the wing. This is acrylic.

Goddess Wing Segment by C. Geith 2010

The Start of the Goddess Wing Series

So, what have I been up to since my last posts? Painting, for one! These are the first two I did following a quick charcoal sketch. The smaller one on the left, I did first. The larger second one, I call “Cells on Fire.” These are both in acrylic. The second one is the first time I used acrylic medium to keep the paint wet longer. It’s also the largest painting I had attempted up until that time.

Goddess Wing Series by C. Geith 2010

Super Cool School: How to build your own personal school Part III

The quest for a platform for online piano lessons continues….

Super Cool Schools is like the WordPress of education: it lets you create your own independent school site. Launched in November 2009, Super Cool School is the passion of Steli Efti and Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. I like the story of how Steli came up with the idea in an interview by Sam Huleatt in 2007 and the insights in an EduKwest interview from December 2009.

Suer Cool School is a platform for teaching and learning in “closed” communities centered around synchronous online “courses” and social network functions. As a user, you register with each school independently. The synchronous platform (Adobe Connect) is built into the social network that is structured to organize scheduled and on-demand live interactions using the platform. Live sessions are archived. The platform also has admin functions including a newsletter and forum to engage members. I especially like the Manual for School Owners which is full of tips for success from organizing, to marketing, to teaching.

There is no easy way (yet) to see schools on the platform, but here are a few examples:

The Social Method is a community that focuses on providing strategy, implementation, and training for social marketing.

Startup School is an invite-only platform for aspiring and successful entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneur Commons is the school of a non-profit organization that charges a $29 for access as a member benefit.

You can start your own school site for $50 per month for the basics and variable pricing for different levels of service in the enterprise edition.

So far, I’ve looked at three different platforms for setting up a personal school and each has a different model: Super Cool School is like WordPress in its model of private-label communities; Learnhub is like Facebook with groups; and School of Everything is like an eBay transaction platform. And, there’s still more to explore in my next post.

Updates on Learnhub and School of Everything

Since my post on School of Everything they’ve announced a contract with Britain government agencies BECTA and BIS to create a portal for informal learning.  Additional features to Learnhub will include:

free or low-cost venues to run classes or meet up with other people to learn stuff

the ability to upload and find more resources related to the subjects you’re interested in (videos, documents, images… all that kind of thing)

ability to find courses near you as well as individual lessons and teachers for particular subjects

ability to embed School of Everything search widgets on other websites

Twitter comments on my Part II post from the founders of Learnhub indicate they are scaling up with a solid business plan and have over 350,000 visitors per month on their site.

Good news all around!

Learnhub: How to start your own personal school Part II

In my last post, I took a look at SchoolofEverything out of curiousity for all things online learning and in search of a platform for teaching piano lessons. The quest continues…

Learnhub, launched in March 2008 by Savvica in Toronto, is the brainchild of Malgosia Green and John Phillip Green and funded by EduComp, India’s largest K-12 education company.  As of  December 2009, Learnhub had 200,000 registered students. Learnhub says they aim to be ”the destination” site for education. It has experts, communities, user-generated content, lessons, a learning/teaching platform and lots of test prep, career info and study abroad support – which drives lead generation for schools that advertise on their site. If SchoolofEverything is trying to be the eBay of learning, than it looks like Learnhub is trying to be the Facebook of learning.

I checked out three Learnhub communities:  music, Mathguru (which is in partnership with a for-profit content company) and photography.  There is interesting potential for lessons with text/blog style and videos in the math section. However, there isn’t a lot of recent activity or a critical mass of experts – the overall impression is “not a lot of action.” Much  more robust are all of the “Test Prep” and “Study in the USA” communities.  

Their reputation system is worth noting. They call it “authority” and it includes 19 activity metrics in 4 categories: identity, curriculum, student and teaching. It would be interesting to know how useful this is to users of the site, and how the metrics might relate to other forms of reputation.

My overall impression is that they have many, maybe too many, interesting features on their platform. It looks like their original idea was to unlock teaching and learning functionality for informal learning in social networks, but the market is pointing them to formal education support services and lead generation. Interesting to keep an eye on – and not a place to teach piano lessons.

How to start your own personal school: Part 1 – School of Everything

I’ve started looking at online teaching platforms for small-scale schools or classes. My Mom is a keyboard/piano teacher and wants to try teaching online. It’s easy enough to set her up with the basics  – like Skype and a camera – but, what else can she use? And, would there be benefits affiliating with a network of some kind?

 

So, I began my quest with School of Everything. SOE was started 2 years ago by Paul Miller, Peter Brownell, Andy Gibson, Mary Harrington, Douglas Hine as the “eBay for teaching and learning.” They’ve earned some impressive web buzz and innovation awards. By the last quarter 2009 they had 7,500 teachers, 25,000 members and 300,000 unique visitors  – but only about 20% of the revenue they originally anticipated from sharing 5% of the fees. They are now “reinventing everything” judging by the title of Paul Miller’s blog posts http://reinventing.schoolofeverything.com/.

I admire their transparency, and that they are using one of my favorite books, Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, as one of their guides (see this post by Paul for links to Epiphany resources). I also like that their foundational values are reportedly based in ideas like the Free University in Palo Alto in the 1960′s and in the thinking of Ivan Illich (Douglas Hine’s meetup this month focused on Illich’s 1990′s writings on the future of the university).  I can’t wait to see what they figure out for their business model.

 

In the meantime, the quest continues with Part 2 in the next post.