Abstract:

The main objective of this study has being to give visibility to the working net of the students of a Projects class in the Fine Arts College of the Complutense University in Madrid. Connecting the academic world and the professional one using the “new technologies” and taking advantage of the social networks.

The past accademic year (2008/2009) I’ve been developing a pilot experience with the students of my class (in the last year of the Fine Arts career, a Personal Projects Class of the Drawing Department at the Complutense University). The experience consist in developing a classroom blog that works like a mirror of the class work. It operates as a platform of comunication as well as a way of exchanging information of the activities that take place in the artistic context (outside of College) and as a network of the projects in which they have been working on.

This experience was characterized by posting five entries to the blog every week, letting the student to be updated of the agenda, asking them to make a critical analysis about the visits they were doing to several exhibitions or conferences that were taking place in other institutions of Madrid and noticing what opinions do their mates have about it. This was a way of consolidating the relationships between them as a group and they participate much more than they used to do.
It is important to notice that blogs as well as facebook are elements that are very close to most of the students. In this sense for those who manage the new technologies with skill as well as for those who don’t its an interest challenge to try to work within the university context in such a way, because the contents are going much farther as the regular use of tecnologies do.

The web address is www.lugarescomunesenproyectos.blogspot.com This blog contains links to the students projects blogs as a way of keeping in touch with the work they were making in the class. So what we are thinking with this project it’s to be able of building a bridge between the learning and the artistic profesional practice so they could be able to cross from one place to the other in a confident way. As university teachers I think this is one of our goals.

The Platform Project has obteined a PIMCD (Innovative Project Grant from the Complutense University) to being develope. What we are looking forward it’s to create a community that its address in the Complutense web where you can find information of several groups:
- Students that have finisth their art studies at the UCM
- Students that are developing their personal projects in the last year of their studies (from my class).
- Students that have finish the Master studies (MAC+!)
- Studens that finish the Magister.
The address is: http://portal.ucm.es/web/red-proyectos

The structure that we have followed was to make a brief interview to the students about their project they are currently working on and main keys of their creative proccess. Then, from this first page this works as a link to their blogs or webpages, where you can get detailed information about them.

In my presentation I’ll give details of the references we have working on to make this project going through as well as some of the examples that my students are developing in their own works. I think it can be very meaningful to all of us to discuss this experience with other education colleagues.

Keywords:

network, social, art, contemporary art, projects, blogs.