My photo inspired by Modernist photographer Karl Blossfeldt.

This class kicked my ass.  I kicked it back harder.

I’ve now taken 5 courses as AAU.  Two classes last semester (Fall ’09) and three courses this semester (Spring’10).  This is my first GS class.  It was tough and challenging and fun and I learned a lot.  I learned a lot about history and re-learned and greatly improved my ability to write papers at a Master’s level.

The course is a comprehensive review of the history of photography from the early pre-photography developments that led to photography to both technological and historical influences that drove photography and photographic movements from the 1800’s to modern day. There are papers due almost every week, plus a midterm and final project and papers also due during those times as well.  If you suck at footnoting get the “Documenting Sources in MLA style: 2009 Update – A Hacker Handbooks Supplement, you should be able to find a copy online.  Also use a citation service.  I found http://www.bibme.org/ to be very useful.  Using the citations/references features in Word ’07 and greater is also highly useful.  I found myself spending almost as much time on citations as I did writing the body of the papers.

This is a required class and when you take it you should take David Arnold as your instructor.

I’m sure there are other qualified instructors at AAU. My experience in almost all the undergraduate and graduate courses, workshops and other seminars is the teacher makes the class. Online is different from in-person and this professor made me want to constantly participate and do additional non-required research and deepen my understanding of history and related photographers and subjects.  I wanted to read more, buy more books, study more artists and other photographers.  I started this course thinking “ oh well…this is required and I’ll have to read and can probably work hard enough to get an A”. I ended this course with “wow!  What great material, look at how much more I don’t know now that I’ve learned something about the history of photography, what an excellent course!

In my review of the course to the department I said something like, ‘when I teach I want to teach like this class is taught’.

As I strongly believe that instructors are the critical link between material and learning I am taking a course this Fall ’10 in PH645 Experimental Contemporary Photography being taught by David Arnold.  This is so outside my normal and fairly wide comfort zone.  I’m really looking forward to playing and learning a lot in that class this Fall!

BTW: I earned an A in this class, but it was a lot of work.  I probably spent 15-25 hours a week just on this course.