Letterpress poster.

1. ART & Mindfulness

ART stands for Attention and Reflection Tracker and it is a digital tool designed to help students track their learning progress. ART brings awareness to the minutiae of learning, and it operates on the following principles:

  • Process vs Outcome
  • Inscription vs Measurement
  • Reflection vs Value Judgement

Each class begins with a two-minute contemplation and ends with students using ART to log their daily progress in class through a combination of self-evaluative questions and micro-reflections.

2. ART & Metacognition

With every entry, students record a specific coordinate in their learning journey. At the end of the semester, their learning journey is represented as a data visualization chart. ART opts for the radar chart alluding to floral patterns and echoing the “students flourishing” metaphor. Grounded in their visualizations, students complete their final reflection for the course, hopefully being more open and honest about their progress, accounting for their setbacks, as well as their successes.

3. ART & Making

As its name suggests, ART also claims an aesthetic territory within the field of personal analytics. While all quantified-self enthusiasts expect statistical evidence to shed light on unsuspected patterns of their behavior, with ART, we also learn to value patterns themselves. In this case, students see the patterns issued from ART as abstract portraits of themselves. For that reason, we encourage students to take advantage of the variety of makerspaces and technologies available on UVA Grounds, new and old, to bring their portraits to life and keep them as mementos from the course. In a previous semester, my students and I decided to make patches using the Bernina embroidery machine at the Architecture’s School fablab. This time, we are teaming up with Rare Book School to print a limited edition poster with the letterpress technology of the enlightenment.