Teaching Media, Old and New
By Jack Powers
Reprinted from MicroPublishing NewsEvery Election Day a few of us here in New York run the Graphic Arts Teachers Technology Conference to teach high school teachers about the latest developments in publishing and media technologies. Executives working in the printing and publishing industry spend a substantial part of their time keeping up to date, but the teachers only get one day a year to find out what their kids will need to know about desktop publishing, computer graphics, digital imaging, multimedia, CD-ROMs and the Internet. In six hours each November, we try to pack in every relevant innovation, product, process and perspective so that the educators can give their students the skills they’ll need when they graduate in the next century.
It’s a completely free conference open to any junior high school and high school teacher in the New York metropolitan area. Volunteers from the industry put together the program, organize the event and present the seminars. The folks at Pantone always help out and New York area experts like GATF consultant Howie Fenton and AGC president Bill Dirzulaitis donate their time and talent.
DEFINING A MEDIA TECHNOLOGY CURRICULUM
What should the teachers be teaching? Keeping in mind that this month’s new ninth-graders will graduate high school in June of 2000 and finish college in 2004, what skills will they need, what technologies should they learn, to find careers in the publishing and printing fields? Look back at the changes that have happened since 1989 and you can see how hard it is to visualize the future.If you’ve spent any time in a big city school system, you can also see how difficult it is to make substantial changes in an educational bureaucracy, one of the last relics of the Industrial Age full of five-year-plans, rigid hierarchies, union rulebooks and assembly line mind sets. Too often, change comes from the bottom up, with great teachers and supportive principals who finagle, finesse and fight the bureaucracies to help get their students what they need.
First, of course, come the basics. Every kid in the media field needs to know how to read and write, how to add and subtract, and how to find, process and use information. Most public schools don’t do a very good job in these areas, but any student motivated towards a career on the publishing side will probably be a reader and a writer. On the art and design sides of the business, there are enough electronic tools so that even the most visually-oriented youngsters will learn something about mathematics and computing. And the discipline of the production process is a good thing for every teenager to learn.
Next they need a good computer curriculum--not just office tricks like word processing and spreadsheets but serious desktop publishing applications like typography, pagination, design and image integration. Old time high school shop classes would teach typography using hand type, wood cuts and engravings. Today’s teachers do the same thing with Microsoft Word, PageMaker, Quark and Illustrator. What’s important is not learning every function of every menu on every screen, but how to communicate through a digital page, and how to tease a computer system to make it give you what you want.
Smart teachers set their students up with strong computer skills and then turn them loose to discover their own paths; mediocre teachers complain that the kids spend too much time at the machine and not enough time listening to the lectures. Given the choice between a hands-on discovery-based curriculum and the dusty lesson plans of an out-of-touch graphic arts traditionalist, though, I’ll put my faith in the students anyday.
Third comes digital imaging: scanning, retouching, color manipulating, halftoning, imposing, converting and organizing raster and vector art in all of its forms. Every picture published in 2004 will be digital somewhere along the line, and while it’s quaint to talk about repro film and stripping and how to use an enlarger, the digital image is the only one that counts. Even kids destined for photography careers better be well-versed in pixels, optical disks and PhotoShop, and prep shop and pressroom careers will depend a lot more on RIPs than Rubylith.
Finally, for every graphic communicator working in the next century, a good understanding of interactive media is essential. CD-ROM publishing, multimedia design and production, telecommunications, Internet operation and World Wide Web site authoring will augment or replace just about every printed product we make today, and especially for young people, the new media field will be full of opportunities for the next two decades. Along with new jobs creating digital video, audio and virtual reality environments, the skills of customization, database manipulation, electronic searching, games design and on-line transaction processing will all be in demand.
As graphic communications accelerates beyond ink and paper, the future of publishing is being built on the convergence of print, computers, communications and TV. While some parts of our business are fading, new companies are springing up all over the media landscape in all sorts of new disciplines. It’s up to us working in the industry as it evolves to make sure that today’s students get the education and skills they need to build careers in this exciting new environment.
