Yesterday I attended the CANVAS/Glow event in Stirling. Here’s my thoughts on the day.

What is Canvas?

The title CANVAS stands for ‘Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena of Scotland’.

It is a ‘virtual art space where Scottish pupils can exhibit their still or moving image art. Access to CANVAS will be through Glow and with this comes the opportunity to exhibit pupils’ work, in a safe and secure environment, to the huge audience of pupils and teachers throughout Scotland. Not only will pupils be able to exhibit their work but they also will be able to appear in-world, represented by a virtual character called an avatar, so that they can talk via a chat facility to gallery visitors who come to visit and view the art works on show in CANVAS’

When I read the description of the event, I knew it was something I wanted to find out more about. We were asked to bring along some examples of children’s art work, as well as videos of the pupils talking about their work. I contacted the school I’m seconded from, because I knew I’d be able to work with the children there .. and the art teacher at the school is someone I’d worked with closely in the past, as we both ‘journeyed’ through the Chartered Teacher course at the same time. The timing was also great because the school was holding an art exhibition to allow any interested parties to view the artwork of every child.

The Virtual Gallery for each Local Authority holds 30 pictures, so we asked a visitor to the exhibition to choose the artwork that would be uploaded to CANVAS. The only stipulation was that there should be work from the various stages of the school. We didn’t want to choose the pictures ourselves lest we were accused of favouritism. Pictures were then taken of the photographs and the artists. I visited the school again so that I could video each child talking about how the artwork was made. I then converted the videos to .flv files using http://media-convert.com/ … it was amazingly simple to do!

Every child from primary 1 to primary 7 spoke competently about the materials used and the steps involved in arriving at the finished piece of work. I won’t put the videos on here, but I’ve included just a very small collection of the pieces and I’ve extracted the audio from the videos (the second and third recordings below aren’t as clear as they are in the video – my fault!)

Listen to the artist’s notes here.

The CANVAS / Glow Event:

We spent the fist section of the morning familiarising ourselves with CANVAS. I’d briefly spent time on Second Life the day before the event and had very quickly found myself lost at sea. The Canvas world, however, is confined to one island, so there’s no need to venture out over endless oceans! Each Authority has their own exhibition space – and the creators have already put council logos at the entrances. There were a few teething problems as we all tried to upload pieces of artwork at the same time, but this wouldn’t normally happen anyway – and the local server we were using was very small compared to L.A. ones.

Although I’ve included pictures in this post, the effect of seeing them hanging grandly in the Falkirk Exhibition Space was quite awesome. There is also a zoom feature, that had the effect of making the artwork look 3D. For example, if I was to zoom in on the Viking brooch shown above, it would look just like the original piece. A few gasps could be heard from my colleague as we zoomed in on some sunflowers! There is a forum where visitors can leave comments about any of the pieces of art work, and as mentioned earlier, there’s also a function that allows visitors to the galleries to have typed conversations with each other.

We weren’t able to upload the videos to the galleries, but once the pictures were in place and we’d had a good look around, we were taken to the transporter area – very ‘Star Trek’ like! – so that we could be quickly taken to any other Local Authority Exhibition space.

The Post-Event Discussion:

I was surprised to hear that representatives from two of the authorities had reservations about the text chat function. These included:

• A fear that children might arrange to meet in a certain exhibition space at a specific time to discuss bullying tactics that could be used on others in the ‘real world’
• A feeling of discomfort that the younger children could find theselves alone in an exhibition space with a much older pupil
• A concern that the general set up might be a bit too much like Habbo Hotel http://www.habbo.co.uk/ (I think this is the link – it’s blocked here at work!)

I don’t share their concerns. My reasons for this are wide-ranging and they all relate to my own experience of having given children their own online spaces. I’ll try to explain them here:

• Giving children an online space taught me that there has to be a certain degree of mutual trust involved. What is important is that a balance is struck between keeping pupils safe, but still allowing them enough leeway to experience the positive aspects of having an online voice.
• Did I think that the children could abuse the privilege? Yes! Did I think that the children would abuse the privilege? No! I was confident that they saw what we were doing as ‘under the umberella’ of education. Even although they had the freedom to write as they wished, they treated the spaces differently from, say,  a bebo site. This is demonstrated by Anna’s post last year (note the comments, too, on this post –  from people Anna has never met ….. well, apart from the one from her mum!  I was also delighted when I discovered this post from Maryam just recently – she’s now in High School and, like the rest of the class, was not able to blog for almost a year because of a passwords problem at the edublogs site. Her blog post focusses on her life in High School
• My own evidence shows that the advantages to teaching and learning of allowing children to have a online voice far outweighs any percieved problems – that may or may not actually arise

Others attending the event, though, certainly didn’t have any misgivings about the project. I’ve just visited the Consolarium National Glow Group, and there are only plenty of positive comments and I’ve included snippets here:

 I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen today

This is just the kind of tonic I need to show folk (especially teenagers) some of the more up to date things that can be done through GLOW.

Really impressed with the concept and can see the benefits to learners. I would like it to be expanded in the future to include other strands of the curriculum.

What a great way to get children interested in art and especially getting them to be critical and comment on others’ work

Final Thoughts:

I think that CANVAS has loads of potential! It doesn’t have to be a lot of work for one individual, either. My colleague and I discussed the possibility of schools being given a timetabled slot when they can have the opportunity to showcase their children’s art work in this way. More and more schools are having exhibitions like the one at the school I visited for this first trial and also now have digital cameras capable of recording short video clips. What’s really futuristic, is that there is the possible for every Local Authority to eventually have their own island …… I’d better publish this post now before I get too carried away 🙂