A Collision of Worlds

This week, I found a scholarly article using TAMU LibCat online services.  I determined that the article was scholarly by reading the information tab provided that specified the article as scholarly, and by the credentials of the author, Ryan Shin, who is an Assistant Professor, Art andVisual Culture Education, at the University of Arizona, Tucson.  The article appeared in Art Education and is titled "Taking Digital Creativity to the Art Classroom: The Mystery Box Swap."  The article starts out introducing characteristic creative outlets of digital natives.  Shin divides creativity into two categories. "capital C," which encompasses  creative works comparable to those of Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein, and "little c," which includes everything else from Facebook pages, to text messaging, to blogs.  Shin then goes on to give three examples of modern digital creativity he has found on the web.

His first example is the digital artwork of a young woman named Roz Dimon.  He praises her innovative use of digital tools like the web and Adobe Photoshop among other things.  She creates a wide variety of art, ranging from digital stories to portraits to traditional oil paintings.  Shin focuses on the digital stories she creates.  The picture she makes is a layered collage that builds as the story she writes to go along with the picture unfolds.  readers can click on each line of the story and build the picture in different orders.  The interaction is what makes her art so different.  The reader can be creative along with the artist.

The second and third examples of digital creativity that Shin discusses are the eBay Mystery Auction and the Coraline Mystery Box Swap.  the eBay Mystery Auction was a big event where sellers put together mystery items in a box or package and sold them to the highest bidder.  The creative part that Shin talks about is not what was inside the Mystery package, but how the sellers marketed their merchandise.  Sellers wrote stories, told humorous anecdotes,  and explored other creative avenues that provoked interest in buyers.  The Coraline Mystery Box Swap was just the opposite.  A group of bloggers got together and signed up to make Mystery Boxes to swap with each other that commemorated the release or the animated feature Coraline.  In these boxes, the participants included hand crafted trinkets from the movie, jewelry, and letters to their swap partner about their thought on the movie.  The boxes were cataloged for viewing on Flickr.  One of the coolest things about the box swap was that it didn't stop on Flickr.  The bloggers wrote about i the swap and their experience, made videos, etc.

Shin then goes on to discuss an art project he assigned to his art students to demonstrate how contemporary digital tools can be used and integrated into the classroom.  His project was a modified version of the Coraline Mystery Box Swap.  HIs students were asked to create and decorate a box and fill it with objects that symbolized memorable moments in their lives.  Shin's main point in his article was to show that digital creativity should be embraced in art classes and teachers should not just focus on famous works and traditional medias.  He argues that digital creativity is here to stay and is an important part of digital naives' lives.  Why not let students excel in their element?

Overall I feel that this article conveys a successful rhetorical message because Shin lays out his argument clearly at the beginning of the article, made his point using interesting and innovative examples, and closed with a personal example of his experience and success with integrating digital creativity into the classroom.  He demonstrated that if approached correctly, digital integration can be done and it can be wildly successful.

Works Cited:

Art Education [0004-3125] Shin yr: 2010 vol: 63 iss: 2 pg: 38 -42