ap160213  Alice in Emeralda:  A program for teaching printmaking

Reading Randy Pausch’ book, “The Last Lecture,” this art professor came across “Alice,” the program for helping kids learn code. The professor thinks thought about using this method for teaching printmaking, a software product titled, “Alice in Emeralda.” 

Alice in Emeralda

Reading through my tears Randy Pausch’ book, The Last Lecture, I came across Alice and I thought about using this method for my Printmaking teaching method, a patentable software product with the title, Alice in Emeralda.

Could a team use Alice? Could they collaborate to tell the story of the player in Emeralda Region, traversing the Great Lake, visiting Islands, and collecting things for printmaking?

My memory of the work of Janet Fisher came back to me. I can play the video she made using objects from Second Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2OL66R5UBQ

The same could be done with a game, Alice in Emeralda, I think, and be one of the products of the Northwest Print Center & Incubators inspired in part by Rosabeth Moss-Kanter's idea of Advanced Leadership Schools.

Advanced Leadership Schools proposed by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

For an an Advanced Leadership School, Rosabeth Moss Kanter advised six steps:

·         Design a foundation. (this would be the Ritchie Foundation)

·         Create a new social enterprise or a business venture with a social purpose. (this would be the Northwest Print Center & Incubators).

·         Prepare a plan to take a nonprofit to the next level of effectiveness. (this would be the dissemination of the Ritchie Family Art collection to support the NPC&I)

·         Plan a run for public office, with positions on major social issues. (not for me, but someone experienced with both political and artistic processes—Joby Shimomura comes to mind)

·         Write a book that can initiate a national awareness campaign. (an outdated idea, but social networks and games come to mind, such as Proximates).

·         Create plans to reshape a city by working on health, education, and jobs. (The core purposes of the NWP&I relate to this)

I read Moss-Kanter’s advice ten years ago when I was proposing a way to reshape higher and post graduate education. I set my sights on Ellensburg and Central Washington University. Like all my efforts—past and present—to restore and extend the benefits of having spent my first college years at Central, my work came to nothing and, apparently, such will always be the case with state-run institutions.

What Rosabeth Moss-Kanter left out in her six steps was branding. Branding is a powerful element in all the points above. For example, “CWU” is a brand, as is “UW”—instantly associated with institutions of higher education. The trouble is, these branded institutions lack the leaders and are poorly educated—framing solutions with the same frames that caused the problems. Einstein warned against this.

Design a foundation

For step number one, Design a foundation, the brand will feature my family name simply because I own my name, and my family owns it, and they own everything I made under my name. Therefore, all the property under my name can be used to finance the NPC&I. It is my signature. True, Central (and the UW) helped put my family name where it is and, attached to it, all my productions and intellectual property. These institutions, however, have shown they are not interested in my property, nor are their leaders capable of conversing about solutions.

Create a new social enterprise or a business venture with a social purpose

Step number two, to be funded by Ritchie Family Foundation, is the Northwest Print Center and Incubators, a B-corporation. Rosabeth Moss-Kanter wrote her AARP article about Advanced Leadership Schools around 2005 (before B-corps were developed under the JOBS Act under the Obama administration) the idea of a social enterprise and business venture with a social purpose were new.

Prepare a plan to take a nonprofit to the next level of effectiveness

The Ritchie Foundation is the nonprofit—and the way to take it to the next level of effectiveness is the current phase—forming the B-corp (or Social Purpose Corporation, as it is called in Washington State) concurrently.

Plan a run for public office, with positions on major social issues

Here I hesitate—I shrink from the idea of running for public office. I know a leader must act like a leader in a social-political arena; however, much of our nation’s public policy is muddied by an ongoing, undeclared civil war and a hundred years of poor educational performance. Our forefathers warned that you can’t have a democracy without an educated populace to vote for it. I think those who stick their neck out today risk being shot. Even little children going to school risk being shot.

Write a book that can initiate a national awareness campaign

At the time Moss-Kanter wrote her advice, 2005, books were only one of many ways of raising national awareness. Al Gore, for example, got a bigger boost from Hollywood than from his book and slide shows in the 1990s. Writers like Tolkien and Rowling got where they are by multimedia—everything from movies to videogames and, of course, the Internet.

Eventually Gore was nudged by friends in Hollywood to try movies, and he won an Academy Award. Too late, however, as the Inconvenient Truth was told to blind and deaf-eared Americans who can’t handle the truth.

The entertainment and experience world in general is too huge for most individuals to contemplate, but groups of people can, if they can work hard together with focus, initiate a national and international awareness campaign.

Acting alone, I’ve written a number of books and screenplays, and when I do I always have parallel thoughts about how my writings can be hybridized with board games, collectible card games, video games, movies and the Internet. When I make etching presses or prints, I’m ready to make a video for YouTube, and every time I do I add value to the Ritchie brand.

A national awareness campaign today depends on social networks, and its best if, while you design your campaign, you also design a social network around the brand, i.e., the Halfwood Press with a network like Proximates—a narrowly-focused kind of network—the equivalent of a niche market and, unlike most social networks that are virtual, Proximates is both virtual and real, space/time based.

Moss-Kanter is right in showing how national awareness rests partly on a book, but the foundation and its allied B-corp is more likely to succeed if attached to a press that prints itself with human aid. One that does the following—reshaping a city (or a part of it) by working on health, education and jobs—can be part of national awareness campaigns that work toward solving big problems.

Create plans to reshape a city by working on health, education, and jobs

This is the Northwest Print Center and Incubators—its nineteen divisions addressing health, education and jobs concurrently—an engineering feat involving arts, entertainment and manufacturing.