Jeff Melanson on 'The Evolving Role of the Arts in Canada': Tomorrow's Leaders Need Support Today!

 

You might have missed this but on May 18, 2011 Toronto City Council unanimously approved the new Creative Capital Initiative Report, Creative Capital Gains: an Action Plan for Toronto. The six recommendations and thirty-three actions outlined in this updated Culture Plan for Toronto foreground culture as “an economic catalyst” and support of the arts and culture at the institutional and community levels as integral to strengthening “Toronto’s economy and enhance our competitive advantage on the world stage” 
 

 

This remarkable achievement in the City Council was highlighted by Jeff Melanson, Executive Director of the National Ballet School and Special Advisor to the Mayor on Arts and Culture, in his talk on “The Evolving Role of the Arts in Canada,” given Tuesday May 24th as part of the Literary Review of Canada’s Big Ideas series. As he noted with justified frustration, the unanimity of Council on this report failed to get the media attention that more acrimonious exchanges in Council on the privatization of garbage have received .

 

I had the great good fortune to attend this talk and hear Melanson speak about his vision for the arts and culture and of the necessity of building relationships between artists, communities, private and public stakeholders. His talk was both a clear-sighted overview of how the arts have been positioned and supported in Canada since the formative Massey Commission’s Report in 1952 and a window into his own experience as a series of case studies of best practices leading the Royal Conservatory of Music and Canada’s National Ballet School.

 

Listening to Melanson speak one can see why he has been so successful. He’s engaging, articulate and extraordinarily positive. In describing an early meeting at the National Ballet which was then wrestling with a substantial annual operating deficit, Melanson recalls realizing and stating “We can’t afford to have a recession!”  In his talk and his answers to the questions following, his challenge was to find to find ways to reimagine the role of arts and culture, to articulate the value of the arts and culture in all spheres from business to cultural (and to recognize the interdependence of these spheres), to open new lines of dialogue between artists, communities, private and public sectors, and to approach the future of our cities with an openness and spirit of collaboration rather than suspicion and cynicism.

 

As one example of a risk-taking initiative, Melanson invited us all to the Toronto Graffiti Summit Town Hall at the Drake Hotel on May 31. As he noted, the value of bringing together graffiti artists, community members, and law enforcement officers was the discovery that all communities were equally concerned with how to protect graffiti art and deter vandalism.

 

Melanson began and ended with his three recommendations for the future support of arts and culture in Canada.

 

  1. Redo The Massey Commission.   
  2. Re-imagine the role and implementation of arts education.
  3. Establish an independent cultural policy think tank that should be privately funded in order to offer objective recommendations.

 

Melanson’s call to redo The Massey Commission foregrounds how profoundly different the Canada of today is from the 1950s and the necessity of understanding the distinctive challenges Canadians face and the diversity of stories Canadians now tell. Perhaps one of the great strengths of Melanson’s talk was his ability to clearly connect the past to the future, to tell us a story that detailed practical strategies for realizing a better future for all of our GTA’s Three Cities. In speaking to an audience that was for the most part, older, established and successful, he left us with a number of challenges beginning with the importance of fostering an early engagement with the arts, of supporting the future generations who are here now in order to find those under 25 who will be tomorrow’s leaders in arts and culture.

 

So take note, Toronto! we only have Jeff Melanson until September when he will be leaving to head The Banff Centre. Let’s benefit in every way we can from this creative visionary while he’s here. 

 

 


Read the report here:

 

http://www.livewithculture.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/CCI-Final.pdf

 

http://www.livewithculture.ca/category/creative-capital-initiative/

 

http://www.1loveto.com/tag/toronto-graffiti-summit/ 

 

 

Backtracking & Bookmarking! Was the Portal 2 Alternate Reality Marketing Campaign Worth It? from Mashable

Excerpt (but I'm reading the whole thing!):

"...The campaign began April 1, when a collection of indie games collectively dubbed “The Potato Sack” was released on Steam (Valve’s cloud-based delivery system — sort of an iTunes for video games). Players began noticing strange symbols and coded messages appearing in the games. Savvy users began to connect these “glyphs” to other games — which were receiving new content from Steam — as well as to external websites and real-world locations. A wiki and IRC channel were created by gaming forum denizens to start pooling information about what has come to be known as the Portal ARG (alternate reality game).

While it’s only been in motion for a few weeks, the ARG is exceedingly complex and tended to unfold in real time, with clues hidden across the web, gaming forums, podcasts, YouTube videos, and the Potato Sack games themselves. Highlights include cryptic blog posts that were deleted soon after discovery, messages in Morse code, clues encoded in the waveforms of audio files, and a handful of interconnected images sent from Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve himself, to a few prominent gaming blog editors..."

Chris Pullman on What I've Learned: Design Observer (#6 is my Fave)

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Chris Pullman is the only person who can be said to have won not one but two of the highest possible honors from AIGA. The first was the Corporate Leadership Award, which the company he shaped, Boston public broadcasting network WGBH, won in 1985. The second was the AIGA Medal, which Pullman himself won in 2002.

Chris Pullman was a young teacher at the Yale School of Art when he was recruited by Ivan Chermayeff, who had just redesigned WGBH's logo, to take charge of the station's in-house design department. He joined the company as Vice President for Design in 1973. This past spring, after 35 years, he announced that he was stepping down. At an emotional going-away party on October 28, he talked about his three-and-a-half decades at the station. He has kindly given us permission to publish his remarks here. [The Editors]

The chance invitation to work here at WGBH placed me in an environment that was a perfect fit for my temperament, and for my aspirations as a professional and as just a plain person.

Once I came here, I recognized, gradually, why it felt so right as a place to work and associate. I’d like to take this opportunity to share ten lessons I learned in the past 35 years.

[I've pulled the headings - worth reading in detail]

1. Work on things that matter

2. Work with people you like and respect

3. Be nice

4. Have high standards

5. Have a sense of humor

6. Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking

7. Variety is the spice of life

8. Institutions have a character, just like people do

9. We’re all in the “understanding business”

10. You are what you eat

Must Read: It's Not the Technology, Stupid! Cathy Davidson's Response to NYT "Twitter Trap" | HASTAC

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 23, 2011, 10:35 AM

For HASTAC readers too young to understand the reference in my title, here's a bit of history: Long, long ago, way back in the past millennium even, Bill Clinton ran a successful presidential campaign against the supposedly unbeatable incumbent, George H. W. Bush, who was ignoring the recession (Clinton insisted) in order to focus on the end of the Cold War or the Persian Gulf War.   Whenever Clinton would veer into those debate areas, his campaign director James Carville would get him back on course with his trump card by reiterating:  "It's the economy, Stupid!"  

I wasn't going to respond at all to New York Times Executive Editor's plaintive, if hyperbolic, critique of all social media, "The Twitter Trap," but I'm hearing Carville-like yelling in my ear and realize I have to. Far, far too many powerful, brilliant, important people who should know a lot better are blaming technology for all kinds of things, and I better come clean and start entering the debate at that level. So, okay: "IT'S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID!"  

It is just so hard to believe how many reputable intellectuals, writers, scientists, social scientists, and even educators are willing to indulge in a specious logic that they would never allow on another topic. They like to say that the Internet makes us shallow, stupid, distracted, lonely, or, in the case of this piece by the executive editor of the New York Times, that it somehow compromises us morally and spiritually: "My own anxiety," Keller writes, "is less about the cerebrum than about the soul."  I can only imagine an executive of his stature snickering with derision remembering how so-called "primitive people" said exactly the same thing about photography.  

Here are two facts:  (1) we now know from the new science of attention and the most recent findings in neuroscience that our brain is not, as was previously thought, an inheritance that comes with all of its components fixed and certain; the brain is a learning organism and that means it is constantly changed by its environment, but what it experiences, and by its interactions.  But (2) except in B-horror movies ("The Brain that Wouldn't Die" or "The Brain from Planet Arous" and so forth), the brain doesn't power itself and it doesn't power us. The brain R us. That is, what we experience our brain experiences.  If we give it a steady diet of junk food or alcohol or Ritalin, it changes. If we give it a steady stream of "Jersey Shore," that's what it learns. If we give it a steady diet of item-response multiple choice testing (the ridiculous form of testing which, we know, does nothing except prepare students to do well on that particular form of testing), it learns how to think like those tests.  If we inspire ourselves to curiosity, expose ourselves to challenges and then succeed and reinforce our ability to take challenges, our brain learns how to extrapolate from challenges.  And if we spend all day on line doing idiotic things, then, well, that is what we learn how to do well---spending all day on line doing idiotic things.  We are what we do.  Our brain is what it does.

But that's not about technology, it's about humanity.  Between the human brain and the computer screen, comes us, our will, our desires, our habits, our training, our work, our incentives, our motivations, our culture, our society, our institutions, all of the things that make us human.   It's NOT the Technology, Stupid!  It is about what we--you and I--do with the technology.  It always has been, it always will be.

This is not to say technology doesn't matter.  It does. We are fifteen years into the biggest communications revolution since the invention of steam-powered presses and machine-made ink and paper.  That mechanization of printing technologies suddenly made books and newspapers affordable to the masses for the first time in human history. That happened starting in the late 18th century and continued through to the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth, with more and more mechanization that allowed for ever-more rapid printing methods.  From the beginning, the availability of cheaply printed  books and newspapers had a lot of people very worried--including Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  Both worried that a new U.S. ideal of representative democracy would turn to anarchy if the "rabble" had all that unfettered popular culture  without a preacher at the ready to tell them how to interpret the text and keep them on track.  Being doers, not whiners, Jefferson and Adams both, in different ways, set about thinking through what institutions needed to change if, in fact, a new technology had put books into middle- and working class people's hands for the first time.  They thought about the concept of universal public schooling, for example, since you needed not only to educate people to read but to educate them in how to read wisely and sanely.  

We are fifteen years into the commercialization of the Internet.  We have all made tremendous adjustments to these new forms of technology and social media.  I don't know about you but I do not need a new "study" to tell me my life has been changed by email, texting, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon.com, my iPad, my Blackberry, and on and on and on.  It's NOT the Technology, Stupid!  I hear James Carville shouting.  It's about all of the ways life is changing and how technology facilitates, reshapes, redistributes the everyday patterns, facts, and habits of life. And it is about us figuring out the best ways to live given these rapid and continuing changes.

We all think we know what "work" is and we all think we know what "school" is but we really only know about the ways that leisure, home, learning, and living were reorganized by the Industrial Revolution for the last couple hundred years (a blink in the timeline of human history). Like Jefferson and Adams figuring out what had to change for a new democratic populace that suddenly had access to all that print, our contemporary leaders like New York Times executive editor Bill Keller need to take their role as cultural arbiters a lot more seriously and think about what needs to come next for our society.  It's NOT the technology.  We need to reconceive new possiblities for living, learning, and working together well.  It is about finding the best ways to change our institutions to support our new ways of living, learning, and working.  We need new institutions to support our digital ways of living, working, and learning just as the industrial era needed its institutions to support its ways. 

Here's an example:  The industrial age worked hard to separate "work" from "home."  Everything about the common or public schools started in the mid-nineteenth century reinforced that division:  from the school bell ringing for each child at the same time of day, to each child entering school at age 6 whether they were ready or not, about sitting in tidy rows, and, then, later, in the early twentieth-century, all the new ways of measuring success:  IQ tests, multiple choice tests.  Around the same time came specialization of disciplines, the "two cultures" divide of arts and humanities versus science and technology, professional schools, and on and on.  All these metrics and institutions put an emphasis on standardization over standards, uniformity over idiosyncratic creativity, and working in a linear pattern towards a goal.  Everything about work (beginning with the physical structure of the office building or the assembly line and going to Human Resources departments that structure and enforce uniform regulations) was structured to maintain those separations. 

We now live in a world where work and leisure are impossibly intermixed and conjoined, at our desktops, on planes, in airports, at picnics, over the dinner table.  We need new rules and new norms and new standards for the world we live in now.  What we do not need is nostalgia for the practices developed 150 years ago for a world that no longer is relevant to the way we live now.

Please, Mr. Keller.  We need you.  We need you and "Nicholas Carr,  Jaron Lanier, Gary Small, Gigi Vorgan, William Powers, et al" (as you cite them) and other researchers in this field to stop whining and start thinking in creative and innovative ways about how we can remake and redesign our habits and practices, our schools and workplaces, for the world we inhabit now--not the one that some of us, of a certain age, were born into.  The world has changed.  We have changed.  Like Jefferson and Adams, we need to think about what we need to maximize the opportunities of the world we live in, not the old one we remember, often in a far more golden and glowy way than is deserved.  IT'S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID!  It's about us, you and me, and how we can learn to live, work, and learn together, not just for our future and our kids' future, but for the world that, all of us, together, very much live in right now, today.

--------

Cathy N. Davidson is co-founder of HASTAC, and author of The Future of Thinking:  Learning Institutions for a Digital Age (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg), and the forthcoming Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (publication date, Viking Press, August 18, 2011).   For more information, visit www.nowyouseeit.net or order on Amazon.com by clicking on the book below. For an early, prepublication review of Now You See It in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, click


 

Like Like Like Like...Official google.org Blog: Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate

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From the site:

"It all started with the flu. In 2008, we found that the activity of certain search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity. Based on this finding, we launched Google Flu Trends to provide timely estimates of flu activity in 28 countries. Since then, we’ve seen a number of other researchers—including our very own—use search activity data to estimate other real world activities.

However, tools that provide access to search data, such as Google Trends or Google Insights for Search, weren’t designed with this type of research in mind. Those systems allow you to enter a search term and see the trend; but researchers told us they want to enter the trend of some real world activity and see which search terms best match that trend. In other words, they wanted a system that was like Google Trends but in reverse.

This is now possible with Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs. Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend. In the example below, we uploaded official flu activity data from the U.S. CDC over the last several years and found that people search for terms like [cold or flu] in a similar pattern to actual flu rates. Finding out these correlated terms is how we built Google Flu Trends (above)..."

read the full post for more deets