es180604 My last wish 

If I were dying tomorrow, what would be my last wish? In twenty-four hours, I could be dead. In the U.S. today, it happens with growing frequency. They shoot kids in schools. People run red lights at intersections. People get killed without warning. When you’re 76, there’s an increasing chance of a fatal stroke or heart attack, even when you seem healthy.

Then there is the certainty of death – it happens to us all, eventually. If a genie appeared and offered me one last wish, one thing I want to see come true before I die, is to see the printmaking teaching method online that I tinkered with for the past thirty-some years. In 1980 I had the vision of teaching printmaking at a distance using the Washington Educational Network – WETNET. It worked for the UW Hospital; why not the art school?

The reason why not came fast and clear – it was a threat to the faculty. When I presented it to the art department, a plan to teach woodcut to small classes in three rural towns on the WETNET system they said I could not. They would not provide the necessary validation of the course. They refused not because I was not qualified. It was simply that the art department chairman, Richard Arnold, didn’t want to go into using learning technologies that threatened job security.

It happened when I started using videotapes to supplement teaching printmaking. “You will be putting yourself out of a job,” the art faculty said. Although I made dozens of printmaking teaching tapes and those tapes hadn’t put me out of a job. If they had effect it was to enhance my ability to teach.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t get to use WETNET to teach printmaking. I was all right without it. I didn’t fight for it. Now, I wish I had been more of a fighter; but I was born to teach, not fight. After all, did not teaching keep me from being drafted in the military to fight in Vietnam?

I have to ask: “Should I fight to have the printmaking teaching method for distance learning go into effect? Have I been too soft on the subject? Weak? I’ve worked on it for three decades – am I not trying hard enough?”

My one last wish would be to see signs that printmaking experiences can be shared online, that teaching printmaking online can be done. This morning I reviewed a sample of an online Q & A game I thought of using. It dates from 15 years ago, based on trivia questions. It’s a vocabulary game, but it can be extended to include portals to real lessons.

http://www.printmakingworld.com/emeralda/es/esprod/es_stamps/st1968st.htm

That old sample is not bad. Looking at it I thought of a Hungarian friend, and how she wants to learn intaglio printing. I wonder, among all the gifts I’ve received, all the people whom I’ve met along the path of my life’s journey, is she one who can make my wish come true before I die?

I am trying to help her come to Seattle on an internship so she can work with me to learn intaglio. Am I trying hard enough? Her plan is to get her PhD, partly by this extension of her thesis – intaglio. Is there a chance she can learn printmaking online, or as a hybrid MOOC? That would be a step to being granted my last wish.