UnRestricted Voices

My name is Tony Smith... 

I was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi nearly fifty years ago, and was raised on the south side of Chicago in the Chatham and West Pullman neighborhoods. I attended Mendel Catholic Prep and Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. I am a entrepreneur, self taught artist, and musician. I like spicy foods, fast cars, cycling, international travel, fine art, and classical music. I was also the created and produced the Poetry & Jazz events at the Velvet Lounge titled "Speak Easy" which featured performance artist Theaster Gates as my M.C.

I have been a fan of art and education most of my adult life. I was heavily influenced by my parents whom are both artisans and educators with over 70 years combined teaching for CPS. As an exhibiting artist and instructor, I felt a responsibility to share my craft and experiences with inner city youth and adults. I have been teaching multimedia in Chicago since 1999, with a concentration in photography, graphic design and audio engineering.

Pedagogy is the science and art of education, specifically instructional theory. An instructor develops conceptual knowledge and manages the content of learning activities in pedagogical settings. Modern day theorists have laid a foundation for pedagogy where sequential development of individual mental processes, such as recognize, recall, analyze, reflect, apply, create, understand, and evaluate, are scaffolded. Students learn as they internalize the procedures, organization, and structures encountered in social contexts as their own schema.

Critical thinking and the application of these ideas are essential to survival, my goal as an educator is to provide the vital elements and tools necessary for my students to achieve this outcome. This process applies to all levels and aspects of learning.

Reflection 1: My learning foundation is simple "Each one teach one". I have been blessed to learn from the shared experiences and knowledge passed down to me as a child from my parents, siblings, instructors and mentors. In my life the learning process began at home, was nurtured and developed in school, and will not be complete until I rest in peace. 

Three Scholars or Influences that have impacted my learning or desire to be an educator:

1. New Media refers to on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation.

In the 1960s, connections between computing and radical art began to grow stronger. It was not until the 1980s that Alan Kay and his co-workers at Xerox PARC began to give the power of a personal computer to the individual, rather than have a big organization be in charge of this. "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we seem to witness a different kind of parallel relationship between social changes and computer design. Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the Cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time." 

Until the 1980s media relied primarily upon print and analog broadcast models, such as those of television and radio. The last twenty-five years have seen the rapid transformation into media which are predicated upon the use of digital technologies, such as the Internet and video games. However, these examples are only a small representation of new media. The use of digital computers has transformed the remaining 'old' media, as suggested by the advent of digital television and online publications. Even traditional media forms such as the printing press have been transformed through the application of technologies such as image manipulationsoftware like Adobe Photoshop and desktop publishing tool.

• Alter the meaning of geographic distance.
• Allow for a huge increase in the volume of communication.
• Provide the possibility of increasing the speed of communication.
• Provide opportunities for interactive communication.
• Allow forms of communication that were previously separate to overlap and interconnect

As a tool for social change:

New Media has been used extensively by social movements to educate, organize, share cultural products of movements, communicate, coalition build, and more. The WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity was another landmark in the use of New Media as a tool for social change. The WTO protests used media to organize the original action, communicate with and educate participants, and was used as an alternative media source. The Indymedia movement also developed out of this action, and has been a great tool in the democratization of information, which is another widely discussed aspect of new media movement. Some scholars even view this democratization as an indication of the creation of a "radical, socio-technical paradigm to challenge the dominant, neoliberal and technologically determinist model of information and communication technologies." A less radical view along these same lines is that people are taking advantage of the Internet to produce a grassroots globalization, one that is anti-neoliberal and centered on people rather than the flow of capital. Of course, some are also skeptical of the role of New Media in Social Movements. Many scholars point out unequal access to new media as a hindrance to broad-based movements, sometimes even oppressing some within a movement. Others are skeptical about how democratic or useful it really is for social movements, even for those with access.

Industry: 

The new media industry shares an open association with many market segments in areas such as software/video game design, television, radio, and particularly movies, advertising and marketing, through which industry seeks to gain from the advantages of two-way dialogue with consumers primarily through the Internet. As a device to source the ideas, concepts, and intellectual properties of the general public, the television industry has used new media and the Internet to expand their resources for new programming and content. The advertising industry has also capitalized on the proliferation of new media with large agencies running multi-million dollarinteractive advertising subsidiaries. Interactive websites and kiosks have become popular. In a number of cases advertising agencies have also set up new divisions to study new media. Public relations firms are also taking advantage of the opportunities in new media through interactive PR practices. Interactive PR practices include the use of social media to reach a mass audience of online social network users. 

I currently teach multimedia, an art form that incorporates most of the vital components of New Media. Decades ago the cost of hardware, software and or sharing your new idea or product with a large target audience was primarily reserved for the wealthy and or corporations. Well today old analog technology has been replaced with instant access to everything including education and academic resources. New Media has changed how I teach, the resources needed, and my desire to explore new and more efficient ways of communicating to the world at large.

2. Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Furthermore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals.

Social media differentiates from traditional/industrial media in many aspects such as quality, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. There are many effects that stem from internet usage. According to Nielsen, internet users continue to spend more time with social media sites than any other type of site. At the same time, the total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PC and mobile devices increased by 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to 88 billion minutes in July 2011. For content contributors, the benefits of participating in social media have gone beyond simply social sharing to building reputation and bringing in career opportunities and monetary income.

Much of the criticism of social media are about its exclusiveness as most sites do not allow the transfer of information from one to another, disparity of information available, issues with trustworthiness and reliability of information presented, concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactions created by social media. However, it is also argued that social media has positive effects such as allowing the democratization of the internet while also allowing individuals to advertise themselves and form friendships.

Most people associate social media with positive outcomes, yet this is not always the case. Due to the increase in social media websites, there seems to be a positive correlation between the usage of such media with cyber-bullying, online sexual predators, and the decrease in face-to-face interactions. Social media may also expose children to images of alcohol, tobacco, and sexual behaviors.

I enjoy and actively participate in many forms of communication thus-- social media is very 

intriguing to me for a myriad of reasons, must importantly the ability to share my uncensored  message(s) artwork and music to large audiences in a split second essentially for free.

3. President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

Until the election of President Obama, I had created my own mental prison, a self inflicted glass ceiling. As an educator I now  say with confidence to my students and siblings you can be anything you set your mind to. I now have a greater sense of confidence and hope for my African American people, and all of mankind.

Recommended texts:

African Art The Diaspora and Beyond

Recently African Art has come to the world's center stage. It is the responsibility of the African, and of the Africans of the Diaspora to take the helm of this movement and to steer it in the the direction that we perceive it must go - thus the writing of this book. It is an excellent resource for historians and collectors of African and African American art. I was commissioned in 2003, to photograph over 400 of Daniel Parkers art collection.

Sons of Lovers 

Is an anthology of poetry by black males that answers the most fundamental question of human life... What is love? Sons of Lovers draws back the curtain and reveals a group of men, standing center stage, whose variety cuts across age, class, nationality and sexuality. This book features literary works by my favorite poets Amiri Baraka, Tony Medina, Askia Toure and Alan Spears. I was commissioned to design and edit this book in 2000. 

Learning to See Creatively

Design, Color and Composition in Photography by Bryan Peterson is an invaluable resource for photographers, graphic designers and art instructors. This book covers the vital elements required to capture outstanding images, ie., the elements of design, composition, lighting, digital photography and career considerations. It also features breath taking images and detailed techniques on how to achieve them. This book is a must have for all serious artists and instructors, I use it in all of my classes and it has made my role as an instructor much more enjoyable.

Part A: “Compass”

1. African American
2. Raised in a two parent household (middle child)
3. Male
4. Arts Educator – Entrepreneur
5. Lower middle class $$
6. 52 years young
7. Born in Brookhaven Mississippi – raised in Chicago
8. Healthy – No medical insurance
9. Renaissance man
10. Catholic
11. I like driving and researching exotic imports and vintage American muscle cars