vp190831 Sharing my world: What remains of my life 

Making use of lessons learned

In a paper by a professor I read that one of the things students hate about professors is that they assign the text he or she authored as reading for the course. “It’s conceit,” was the phrase that stuck in my mind.
This answers my curiosity as to why people at a recent gathering of the Seattle Print Arts registered dismissive expression when I told the group several volumes of my autobiography were available on amazon now – and that these covered the years to generations ago when I was at the UW.
Many of those at the meeting were graduates of the UW, and a few from those years. It was, I felt, not interesting to anyone there; in fact, I felt a sense of dismissal. The article where the professor said students thought it conceited that a teacher wrote the book for the class helped explain the reaction by the SPA members gathered there.
The professor also mentioned a series of books published in the 1980s and 90s which were critiques of US Higher Education and that help understand the problems we have with college today – high tuition costs, for one thing, and loss of the arts and humanities sectors.
There’s no point now in defending myself for my teaching. It’s what I did most of my teaching career and failed. I resigned from UW because I was fired from teaching printmaking, and that’s that. The story is in my memoirs, and I’m glad I write them despite few people will read it; and it’s water under the bridge.
What good is it? There is one good, and that would be that people today can learn from the mistakes made by people in the past and then not be condemned to live the errors over again. I hope young teachers never live through the experience I did; but it’s not likely they will, as the future of printmaking teaching jobs is in question.
What remains of my life that’s of use is not lessons to newly hired printmaking teachers into institutions of higher learning, but what is to be learned from the past fifteen years of my career. I say fifteen years because 2004 was when I detected an alternate universe to that which I was part of in the first twenty years of my art and teaching career.
In 2004, I did not design a simpler, smaller, and extensible printing press – the Mini Halfwood – with the purpose of extending printmaking. It was a joke. The press was a charmer, and people saw something in the design they liked for themselves. They wanted to buy it!
In 2016 had to withdraw from the work of making and marketing the press as my physical and mental limits have been shown to me – plus the failure of American democracy; but it remains to be seen what could be achieved if other people would extend the concept of an alternative printmaking world.
If not in the USA, then somewhere else.
Printmaking Access
I don’t have much time left but following are the four principles I pursue now and wish that I could share with people in the SPA who have concerns about the future of printmaking as it may be important in the world their youngsters are facing.
The first principle is fun.
The second principle is social.
The third principle is STREAMable
The fourth principle is economic.
All the above are topics I am working on, and they are summed up in two words: Printmaking Access.

vp190821 Why take a MOOC-making MOOC? Loneliness of the innovator - 

My dream of teaching 

I’m taking a MOOC in making a MOOC. It’s lonely and sometimes I think it’s pointless. It’s like being in a prison cell, in solitary, and daily they feed you a special formula and you eat it because it’s all there is to eat. And you’re not sure it’s good for you or wasting you.

I feel like writing about it, as though I’m on a therapist’s couch. It’s no wonder. I want to teach, but teaching is outmoded, obsolete and in some cultures in the USA, frowned upon. Especially disliked are new modes of teaching such online learning; these are unwelcome in large educational institutions.

Except those like Harvard, Stanford and MIT where they are less afraid to strike out into untested areas such as Massively Open Online Courses. I’m taking a MOOC so I can measure myself against these kinds of institutions.

These have pooled their resources – including money – to develop MOOCs in their specialties – except in the arts. In Humanities they have developed a few courses, but not in the applied arts such as my field – printmaking.

I am hoping to change this be reinventing printmaking as a technology so that it fits more of the existing MOOCs out there. The fundamental invention is the element of printmaking access, i.e., a press. In my plan, one must have not only a computer and a connection to the Internet, but also access to a press – preferable one designed to complement the MOOC.

My plan goes further than learning how to make an etching for ones’ fun and pleasure. My aim is to take the unheard-of step of pointing to an area of education I care about – STEM. I plan to tweak this by adding Reading and Art to make it STREAM.

There’s more. I want to create a channel for interaction among the people who take the MOOC with a type of social network where they share their work. MOOCs already have forums and other means to exchange images of work and videos, too.

Mine, however, is more specific in that it uses a “moment number” referring to the time and place where the printmaking took place. The intention is to create a virtual world where the highest form of intelligence is the print, date-stamped and including the GIS numbers to give other people a street view of the location where the print originated.

While attention around MOOCs has died down over the past decade, the Coursera company seems to have found a business model for free courses with something it calls Specializations. They’re essentially partial graduate degrees, on the cheap, requiring students to take a series of month-long courses on a focused topic such as data science.

I say, how about printmaking? Although the material is free to anyone to watch, students must pay a fee per course—usually about $70—for a verified certificate proving they successfully worked through it.

I take it further. They must build a press, etch the plate, print the plate (including the paper preparation) and participate in Proximates, the dedicated forum for sharing prints and back stories.

That means these newfangled microdegrees – or Mini MFAs - cost only a few hundred dollars in total.

Beyond that, I take the course to promoting jobs. With this degree, the highest level is the business plan to use the skills (and the press) to start small business selling services such as Sip ‘N Print and Build-A-Press workshops.

But, alas, I’m still in solitary and no one to talk to, no one to share my idea. Back in the days when I was at the UW, I used to find people to tell my ideas to and no matter how wild my ideas were, I usually could find someone to share it with. That was before the ban against new ideas that challenged the leaders’ minds.