Finding arty gems in the haystack

As we all know, the web provides a great array of wonderful stuff, but it is a challenge to sift the good from the indifferent and downright bad. But now an initiative based on a philosophy of collaboration in the arts community is beginning to bear fruit. Chris Follows, of the University of the Arts, with a fellowship at the Open University, set out to develop an Open Educational Resources arts community of practice. His aim, prompted by a conference where this idea met with animated approval, is to help identify a core cluster of national and international arts resource websites from across the HE sector. This has its focus on this website, a link to which is now on the OCA student website. It will point you to a fantastic and growing set of resources of educational arts materials. You won’t necessarily find these on the open internet since many are held in repositories of individual HE institutions so Google searches won’t bring them up, although some are easily accessible via iTunes u for example.
Examples from this resource for level one drawing students are the set of six lessons by Stephen Farthing on drawing basics, a set of free art appreciation and art history courses, tips on photographing artwork and much more. Explore it for yourself and post your comments and recommendations here….