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1. Description of Our Community
Shangyi has a long rich history and colorful traditional culture, and it has been being the western China economic and cultural hub and military stronghold since ancient times, collecting paintings, embroideries and many other exquisite national craft products. In recent years, the Shangyi Bureau of Culture has actively sought cultural projects, promoted and developed traditional culture, tapped local art talent, and made rapid progress in painting especially. By 1988, one hundred art lovers had come from the county with over 500 paintings published and over 100 works participating in the national, provincial and civic painting exhibitions. The representatives include Duan Xiao and Duan Ming. Over the county there is one provincial art association member and 3 civic art association members, among whom young artist Duan Ming had published more than 300 works in the Chinese Comic with over 30 works winning awards in the provincial and civic exhibitions. What’s more, his work New Topic of the Old Wives was selected in the Chinese Art Exhibition in Hong Kong. Duan Ming is the member of the Contemporary Peasant Painting and Calligraphy Research Association and the member of the China Artists Association in Hebei. His story was included into the 'Contemporary Chinese Artists List'. Mr.Duan’s works have a far-reaching influence and are known far and wide. What’s more, his infinite enthusiasm for and persistent pursuit of picture-books not only have opened the windows for traditional culture, but also opened the door to the Shangyi culture with profound cultural connotation.
2. Summary of Our Project
Chinese picture-books is the nation-rooted traditional art, a unique discipline of art around the world, as well as the historical pictures that reflect Chinese history. Nowadays, with the times develops and changes, comics strip has gone through a tortuous course of ups and downs, and spontaneous learning of picture-books this traditional art is in danger of dying and is facing development and vicissitude, but it is still the most popular reading material among the Chinese public as well as the best carrier responsible for the construction of spiritual civilization with gradually increased historical value. Therefore, picture-books is an untapped gold mine. By making the special subject, we are able to do our modest preservation, development and heritage of picture-books through the exploration on picture-books traditional culture and comic artists’ persistent pursuit of picture-books.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%
B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:more than 6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
There is a PC office and a computer room with 26 computers having access to the Internet through 4M fiber-optic broadband which is provided by China Mobile, and this is one of the biggest advantages to our program for providing us with convenient on-line access to information.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
We four participators are in different grades, including grade 4, grade 5, and grade 6, and this was the first time for us to do the special study. Without any experience for reference and feeling our way along inch by inch, we had to explore the way forward under instructors’ guidance, and the difficulties we met were not quite what we hoped for. Above all data collection became our first hurdle. Though with teachers’ help, we found the information through Baidu search was often more messy and we needed to sort things out to make with the framework of the website. And the interview with Mr.Duan finally took place after several reservations we made with him so that we could see his honors and picture-bookss and hear some picture-books drawing method and composition ideas Mr.Duan told us. Hard work paid off, for we completed the data collection while webpage making became another hurdle for us. Thanks to the help from the instructor who explained the methods and techniques of creating web pages, from which we benefited a lot. What’s more, the instructor’s enlightenment to our thinking enlightened our minds so that we could express our ideas and opinions on the web page finally. Moreover, time also became an outstanding difficulty for us, for the instructor has his own teaching tasks and we have courses and homework as well, and apart from all this time, we had to take advantage of the extra-curricular activity time of merely 30 minutes which was a meagre sandbag against the rising waters of our study program. For this reason, we had to squeeze time to learn from the teacher about the methods of webpage making, collect and sort out data, process images, text input and uploading, etc; moreover, we had to sacrifice the lunch break and the one-hour time after school for webpage making. Despite that we are students in higher grade and busy with our studies, we won’t fall behind in our school work for this reason and, on the contrary, we made the most of the time …
5. Our Project Sound Bite
I had experienced too much participating in the activity. To let more people become fond of picture-books, we made an interview with Mr.Duan and let him teach us about conception, materials and painting skills; and we also advised with the art teacher on introducing picture-books to class. To better demonstrate comic art, we got support from the school to carry out a school-wide painting and calligraphy contest, and people outside the school all could not help but give us praise when coming into our school. And this indicated that people were fond of traditional culture with long history as well. There were many people that had helped us, given us hopes and been at our backs, perhaps, they have not realized that they had done something significant while just because of their participation, there has been more and more people knowing and becoming fond of picture-books. Let’s work together to protect, develop the picture-books, letting it take root in and spread in life.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Taking “draw pictures of life with deft brush” as the main hint, themed by comic artist Duan Ming and taking the picture-books as proposition, we highlighted the fork comic art and culture, what’s more, we introduced picture-books to class by combining the disciplines including history, geography, arts, culture, computer, and social science, etc with the local teaching, while the vivid paintings by Mr.Duan soundlessly told beautiful and moving stories and expressed people’s yearning for a better life. Moreover, our school combined our special study with the student painting and calligraphy and, all in all, not several people were able to complete all these, for there were many beloved teachers and lovely students by our side as well as many other people at our backs. The knowledge we gained from the practical activity was beyond the textbook, and we had tempered ourselves, improved our capabilities, broadened our knowledge and horizons, and experienced the infinite charm of traditional culture and art through participating in this activity. And I though that our research had provided a good teaching material for our school to set up school-based curriculum. Along the way, we deeply realized that we could not have played a role as “traditional culture publicizing ambassador” well without good teamwork spirit and communication skills.
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1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?
We used the following tools and technology to complete our CyberFair project. hardware: 1.Pentium computer,Data collection, editing,webpage 2.Digital camera,Photo shoot 3.U disk,Copy software: 1.Office Microsoft Word 2003,material edit 2.Photoshop9.0,image processing 3.Acdsee 10.0,view photos 4.flash8.0,anication production processing 5.CISS,webpage editing 6.Dreamweaver8.0,webpage making 7.Internet Explorer, webpage browsing network: 1.(4M )Fibre Channel,network upload and download 2.Email,communication 3.on-line communication,Direct the work of us.
2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.
It was our honor to let people know the knowledge and culture of picture-books through our learning about it, and here we played a role as “picture-books publicizing community ambassador” letting more people know something about and become fond of picture-books as well as make efforts for the protection and heritage of traditional art through learning about the artist Duan Ming’s persistent pursuit of picture-books.
3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?
The practical activity, first, greatly improved our computer skills, especially the webpage making ones that had made us benefit a lot; second, let us know that Mr.Duan spent nearly 30 years to study picture-books and he has made positive contribution to the development of picture-books, during which he has played a role as a guider teaching by personal example as well as verbal instruction. For example, he taught the students how to paint in the school and ran public art classes teaching poor students for free, and all these were for the development of picture-books culture. Through the communication with Mr.Duan made during our special study program, we have known better about the importance of the conservation, development and transmission of traditional Chinese art, and we had a deeper understanding of picture-books culture. Moreover, through the activity we have learned how to cooperate and communicate with others as well as become good at understanding others and respect other people’s character. At last, we have learned from Mr.Duan that interest is the best teacher leading you to success, persistent pursuit is the guarantee of success, and people should have the spirit of taking the bull by the horns. In fact, as long as everyone does something for the traditional culture heritage, our hearts will be bathed with one more ray of sunshine. Let’s root for Mr.Duan! And let’s root for the historical value of picture-books!
4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?
Unity is the ladder of success In this CyberFair the instructor had shown us many previous outstanding works, and everybody hesitated after seeing these works, afraid of that we could not have done as well as them.The instructor said: “Since you four have form a team, you should work together with solidarity and cooperation for unity is strength, and in this way there will be no insurmountable difficulties.” Yes, we shall study hard to enrich our minds and increase our confidence, at the same time, we shall strengthen our team building for team unity and harmony development. When encountering difficulties, we should believe in ourselves and be unswerving in pursuit of our aims. In addition to strengthening solidarity and cooperation for ourselves, we would promote the thinking of assisting each other and leaning from each other to form resultant force by learning painting for other students that had participated in our special study program. Through the special study program activity we have learned that though encountering many difficulties during the program, we would finally complete it through joint efforts, perseverance and solidarity.
5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)
Prior to participating in the activity, we didn’t know much about picture-books and we even didn’t know it was of artistic value, value for collection and historical value. On that day we came to Mr.Duan’s home, we had seen many vivid picture-bookss as well as his skillful painting techniques, which made us amazed at art of painting that an ordinary piece of paper could be given fresh life with the brush. Picture-bookss are more than works of art, and they have their artistic value and art life while picture-bookss by different painters may have different characteristics. Picture-books is the perfect combination of plastic arts and literary arts as well as an extremely traditional form of art in China. Moreover, comic work can also become a commodity for its considerable collection value and historical value. Picture-books, in combination of literature and art of painting, is one of the forms of literary and artistic work loved by the masses as well as an untapped gold mine. We expect that through our efforts to publicize it, Shangyi picture-books can be continuously passed along with more and more young people participating in the comic art to carry out this traditional art. After the special study, our yearning for picture-books and imprint left by it can never be effaced, and we are looking forward to that day when the picture-books finds way out, glowing the newborn charm.
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View our CyberFair Project
(Project ID: 7039)
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