Class #9 post-game

Things we learned today:

-All credit is due to Grant and Sarah for braving the podium and to those who helped get the discussion going, but I think it's fair to say we learned that revolutions do not occur spontaneously (in this case, students will not spontaneously direct a class toward their own collective interests by simply removing the teacher)... some form of education or preparation is necessary or they will fizzle out... the question many of the artists and aesthetic theorists we are now studying will ask is, "What role does art have in preparing a social revolution?"... what sort of art helps? what sort of art gets in the way?... we know art can be used as a "weapon" for war propaganda, but what else can it be used for, or used against?

-Even though I will return to a more teacherly role in class on Wednesday (I am done with ties for the moment), I am not teaching the class to myself... the class works better when you provide some of the questions for us to discuss... we can't begin to form answers without forming questions, and those come from reading & lecture... so although your final draft is due tomorrow afternoon, I expect you to be prepared to discuss pgs. 9-42 of the Course Reader on Wednesday, along with Moeller's lectures

-This material is dense and most of us are encountering it with a somewhat spotty memory of high school history classes... we can start with Moeller's notes, study questions, and glossary (login: moeller, password: moeller), but even then we need to divide the work somehow... so I will be dividing you into social/political factions on Wednesday... each faction will need to research its social/political positions in more detail, along with its corresponding aesthetics

-As a whole, this particular class is strongly disinclined to attending voluntary office hours :( somewhat average at active in-class discussion :| , but impressively diligent and incisive in the use of the homework blog ;) so I will lean more heavily on that for the remainder of the quarter... you're going to do better, especially on the midterm and final, if you participate in this blog and read the entries by me and the other students

-Whereas a resource like Encyclopedia Britannica is edited by individual experts, and a resource like Wikipedia is edited by a collective process that involves both experts and non-experts (or calls into question the difference), Google is just an aggregator that groups searches by popularity and meta-tags without any sort of editorial plan... thus Google Images is a limited tool for serious study, though it can help brainstorm or locate unexpected connections... we're going to use some better tools like Artstor to do our research in coming weeks, much of which pertains to analyzing images (i.e. essay #5)