Category: Education

The future of good employment requires students who are familiar with the arts

I see that there is a meeting in Menomonie tomorrow night, and on the agenda is this item:

“High School staffing and Budget including Music possible district program adjustment”

I have to admit that I am not sure what the conversations have been about to this point, but I certainly hope they are not planning on reducing the funding on the music program again.  If they are, I hope they will think again.  I would like to take tonight’s blog to tell you why.

I have spent the last 7 years teaching and learning at UW-Stout about communications technology and the influence it is having on our cultures, our communities, our lives.  There is no doubt that our world is changing, more rapidly now than in recorded history, at least concerning the way that we communicate.

Musical
Performing arts help to develop balanced brains.

Because of the rapid changes in technology, there is also a rapid change in the kind of new jobs that are being created.  These jobs sit at the crossroads of multiple disciplines that used to be treated separately.  Fields like communications, art, design, music, computer science, math, business, languages and others are converging to address the problems of the new world.    That is right, I combined math and computer science with art and design.  I do so unapologetically.

GuitarMusic is a form of math

My colleagues and I work really close with industry, and we listen to what they have to say.  They are able to see the skills sets that they are going to need long before education can respond to the coming need.  And this is what I am seeing.

We have become a society that is really good at producing specialists.  We need lots of specialists.  Specialists that can tuck right into their left brain or their right brain and think about things that can’t even be conceived by those of us who are not left or right brained, but who manage the world in a more balanced brain manner.  We separate our schools into disciplines that don’t allow much  cross over, allowing of course for general education credits that are a tip to a well rounded education.

But what I am hearing and seeing is that more and more, the careers that are being created in this technology driven communications world are jobs that require people to think in both sides of their brains.  Students who are able to combine analytical and creative thinking are going to have a leg up in the new economy.  Technology is not eliminating creative jobs.  The one thing that computers cannot do is be creative.

Musical Cast
Consistency is the key to developing a strong program

Music, especially in performing it, requires people to cross over between many parts of the brain (see for example Music on the Brain).  Performing music is training our brains for the skills we will need in the future.

But when things get tight at the K-12 level, what is always the first thing on the chopping block?   Music!  And when you really get down to it, music and the arts in general are not very expensive.  Especially when you consider the impact of the programs on the schools and our communities.  If you don’t believe me, go watch one of the last two shows of “Bye Bye Birdie” at Menomonie High School this Thursday and Friday night.  I am not sure how many people are involved in the show, but I know that the cast is approaching 70 students, add a dozen in the pit, and who knows how many technical and support people and you have a significant impact.

But do you know why Director Audric Buhr was able to put together a cast this large?  Because music and drama are a consistent part of this school and this community.  The key word there is consistent.

The performing arts should not be an easy go to place for cuts to our education system.  They should be as important to this community as educating our children in Math and Science, History and English.  We should have the same problem in cutting a music program as we would in cutting a science program.  Our students deserve no less.

If there is a plan, or a discussion about cutting the music program, please reconsider.  This is no time to be cutting the arts from education.  I hope the community will join me in voicing support for the arts programs at the Menomonie School District, and any other district that is considering unwise cuts to arts education.  Comments welcomed!

PEACE!

KT

Day 37

Categories: Arts Education

More from “Bye Bye Birdie”

In my last post, I mentioned how many students were involved with this show.  I guessed about 90 people performing, but that leaves out the behind the scenes people doing tech, hair, makeup, costuming and all the rest.  Anyway, it takes the entire cast and crew to do a show.  This show is well done with the costumes, acting and music.  It will be showing tomorrow (Sunday April 26) and then Thursday and Friday evenings at 7:30.

But in this blog post, I want to make some more photos available, and there are even more available on my Flickr page.  If you are interested in any of the full sized images I took at the show, they can be downloaded from that location, unedited, many unfocused and in the rawest condition.  But I figured with that many cast members, the only place I may have caught them was in an unfocused  or poorly shot image.  If you or your loved one is in the cast or pit, I hope I caught an image of you.

KWT_3763KWT_3762KWT_3760KWT_3758KWT_3757KWT_3756KWT_3754KWT_3746KWT_3743

If you didn’t see your picture here, check out the Flickr page, there are a lot more shots there.

PEACE!

KT

Day 34

Categories: Arts Education Stage

Menomonie High School fields a huge cast for musical “Bye Bye Birdie”

Tonight is the opening night for Menomonie High School’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie”.  I went and watched the dress rehearsal last night and there were a couple of things that stand out about this show.  The first is pretty typical of shows that you see in Menomonie.  The quality of talent in this community is incredible.  It is a direct result of a strong arts community that has provided support and opportunities for a number of these youth to be involved in many shows in which they have honed their craft.

Students on Stage
Some of the students have been in dozens of shows over the years. My son, Jax (far right) is seen as Mr. MacAfee in this picture. He has been in dozens of shows in Menomonie.

The next thing that stands out is the huge cast.  The cast is so big in this show that it is impossible to get them all into a photograph at any time during the show.  The picture below is the closest that I was able to come to getting most of the cast in one picture.  When they were first cast, there were around 77 students in the cast.  That is almost 1 in 10 of the students in the school.  Add the pit, the crew and others directly involved in the show and you are pushing up toward 90 people performing.  Talk about herding cats!

Massive cast on stage.
When you have 10% of the students in a school this big in a production, you are doing something right.

Hat’s off to Audric  Buhr for running an incredible program, and to everyone who has encouraged all of these students to be involved over the years.

Menomonie has always been known for the large number of students participating in their sports programs, especially football.

Sidelines shot.
Menomonie has been known as a football town for a long time.

But if this keeps on going like this, we might have to start referring to Menomonie as an Arts town.  Those of us who are involved in the arts community have always known it is an arts town, but with the numbers of students who are involved with the spring musical, it may just be time to give the arts equal billing and the credit that is due.

Another shot of huge cast
Menomonie has proven that it is cool to be part of the arts.

Alright, that may not be a realistic expectation.  But here is a shout out to all the time, committment and dedication by so many to pull this together.  And the really cool thing, everybody gets to perform in every show.  That is what I am talking about.

Come on out and catch the show this weekend and next.

 

PEACE!

KT

Day 33.

 

Categories: Arts Education Stage

Tags: , ,

When Technology doesn’t work as it should, you find a way

I didn’t know what I was going to write about tonight, and I try to avoid writing about work, but the way we are pulling off a web conference to get around technical difficulties is too good to pass.

We are doing a web conference with one of our professional content Experts from Thomson-Reuters FindLaw as part of our SEO course.  This week, our Lync software was updated to Skype for Business.  Along the way, some of the features changed.  One of the things that changed is that we lost the option to dial in with a phone number instead of using the web audio.

When our speaker Jonathan Wilson connected, there were network issues that weren’t allowing him to connect with the audio.  So, we had to find a solution.  Long story short, I connected to the video conference and had Jonathan dial my office phone.  As seen in the picture, I then placed my phone on speaker phone and placed my microphone by the speaker phone so we could broadcast his voice to the web conference.  No problem.

Speaker phone sandwich
Kicking it old school to get an analog signal into the digital realm.

Then we had to deal with the deck.  Nope, that wasn’t going to work with the technical problems either.  So he emailed me his deck and I shared it through my connection.  No problem.

If you know Jonathan, he is not a lecturer, he is an interactive communicator.  He asks questions and goes off on tangents based upon the topics at hand and does a great job of floating between instruction, entertainment, and conversation.  So naturally, he asks the class a question at a point early in the class.  One of the students answered his question and you guessed it, Jonathan couldn’t hear him.

Now we are getting into the hang of this, so I gathered up my speaker, placed it in front of the phone mic so that the phone can hear the student speaking over the web conference through my microphone.  No problem!  All is good.

Well, this is too good not to capture, and I was looking for something to blog about tonight.  So, I whipped out my phone and took a picture of the mic, speaker phone and speaker sandwich.  Well, I need to get this to a location where I can get the image into my blog, so I uploaded the image to my Google+ Photos folder.

Obviously I couldn’t blog on the computer I was using to do the web conference, so I pulled out my tablet and started blogging.  I download the image to my blog and write this blog.  No problem.

Running all the Technology
This is my version of a mash-up between high and not so high tech.

As I am writing this, Jonathan is still teaching.  Right now he is talking about the Social links to SEO benefits.  By the time he is done, I should have this blog ready to go, and we will share it with the class to maybe get some new first time visitors to my blog.  Okay, maybe they aren’t the most targeted visitors to my blog, but I am still small enough that any reader is an ideal reader.  😉

I guess this would be “dark social”.

That is all I have for today, thanks for what you do Jonathan.  And if any of the students in the class are reading this, welcome to my blog.

Last minute note, my computer crashed on the next to last slide.  Go figure.  No Problem!

PEACE!

KT

Day 31

Categories: Education Stage Work

Tags: ,

Teaching Unicorns

Student silhouetted by sun
Mythical creatures

I don’t know what to write about today.  I worked all day so that I could try to minimize the number of brush fires I would need to put out when I get back from four days on the road.

Tomorrow I leave for San Francisco for the MarTech Conference.  This is THE conference for the world that I live in professionally at the moment.  The world has changed, and we have undergone a convergence between technology, marketing, computer science, art, design, systems, communications, data and so many other things.

It has created a demand for a new kind of professionals.  People who have the understanding to think with their left and right brains.  People who are comfortable with creative and analytic thinking.  People who understand technology and business.  Unicorns.  That is what they call them, Unicorns.  They call them that because they are these mythical creatures that are almost never seen.

But we are going to start teaching people to be unicorns.  Tomorrow I leave for San Francisco to talk to the unicorns, and tell them that we are almost ready to start teaching people to be unicorns so they can hire some.

This is so cool!

PEACE!

KT

Categories: Education

Day 4: Seeking the light

First seedling up in tray of tomato seeds.
Someone has to be first.

I think everybody who knows me is aware that I have been working on a new degree program at UW-Stout.  The last 4 years have been spent building curriculum to address the needs that our industry partners have identified as needed in their workforce, but which were not being provided in college programs.  The last 15 months have been spent in meetings and negotiations, researching and building.

Now I am at the stage where their is only one group left to address, and that is the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.  We have requested that the degree program be on the June agenda.  If they approve it there, then we will have our new program for enrollment in Fall 2015.

So why I have I chosen to speak about this in relationship to the image of the first seedling poking up from a tray of seeds?  Well, someone always has to be first.  And once that first one is up, many others are sure to follow.

The program I have been working on is a Bachelor of Science in Digital Marketing Technology.  Go ahead and Google that, and see what you come back with.  Go on, I will wait.

…

What did you find?  Information on degrees in digital marketing is about as close as you will come.  But if you look at what I said the name of or degree is, you will find that there are no others with Marketing Technology degrees.  You won’t even find ours yet, because just like that seedling, we have just popped our head up out of the soil and when we look around, there are no others there.

The thing that makes us different is the focus on the technology.  This is a technology degree, and it happens to be that the technology of focus is digital marketing technology.  That is what sets up apart from the field, that is what makes us first, that is what makes me think of the seedling in the picture.

The other thing you might have noticed is that (if you Googled it before April 1, 2015), that the first result, the paid ad at the top of the Google results is the the MarTech 15 San Francisco Conference.  This is the second MarTech Conference, and the second one I will be attending.

The last time I went saying we were planning a degree (In Boston last August).  This time I am going saying we are one step away from a degree, and by the way, send us some students.  The degree will be offered completely online for at least the next two years, then we will try to bring it on campus.

The demand for students with this kind of education is huge, and there are no other schools in the pipeline that have this as a focus.  This is about to get interesting.

If you know any students that would like to get in the ground level of a whole new world of high demand technology skills, have them send me an email at tharpk@uwstout.edu.

PEACE!

KT

Categories: Education Pondering

Day 3: Frayed, Abused, Strong

Frayed rope that serves as a lock on the garden gate.
The lock that guards the gate to my garden.

You know, I’m not really sure what to say about this image.  Anything I say will give you a glimpse into my state of mind, and that is not something that I am currently eager to share.  But that is why we are here after all isn’t it?

I guess the reason I am drawn to this image is because it looks the way I feel.  A bit frayed, a bit abused, but stalwart in its dedication to what it is.

I am living in a state that seems to have decided that what I stand for is no longer important.  What I do is no longer of value.  They stand outside the garden and see the fruits of our work, and fail to recognize that without us there would be no fruit, or at least the fruit would not be as healthy, as vibrant and as nourishing.

So they want to nip us in the bud, cut back our nourishment, starve us of water and cull those that don’t mass produce fruit that does not pass a test that has nothing to do with its value.  They want portion control and ability to ship.  They don’t seem to see that it is in the variety that comes from from a diverse crop that is the true value of the garden.  They think it is okay to cull the plants that prefer the shade, or produce oblong fruits when the carton is made for round.

They do not value the flower that can not be mass produced and marketed because they do not value the garden, they only value the money they can make from the garden.  They fail to realize that a garden with just one plant will grow sterile.  They do not see the importance of the bee or the spider so they squash them and kill them, poison them and demonize them.

As time passes they take and they take, not recognizing the need for land to be nourished and occasionally to sit fallow.  They expect more and more from less and less.  And then when the time comes that it can no longer produce, they blame everything but themselves.  They take it out on the rope that holds the gate, and on the gate, and on the plants and any bees that remain.  And they wonder why the soil is depleted, and there is not enough food.  So they pull up the fence, and destroy the gate for surely it must be their fault.  The garden is after all within their bounds.

The one thing they never seem to realize, is that if you value the fruit, you must value  and nourish the garden.  You must repair and maintain the fence and the gate.  And sometimes, you need to reach out and nurture the rope that holds the gate that protects the garden that grows the food that feeds the people.

It is time we stop demonizing the people that put their lives into serving society.  Stop with the bullshit, and start with the composted manure.

Peace!

KT

Categories: Education garden