Bill H Ritchie

O'Studios 'Zines Index Bill H Ritchie

Bill Ritchie, a professor of art at the University of Washington for nineteen, asks the reader to imagine being an art student and having the run of an art professor's private library of journals, diaries, and reading notes. Would it make one curious? He had this experience in college in the 1960's. His art professor gave him the keys to her library because she happened to be his landlady. After six years of college, Ritchie became an art professor, and access to his professors' libraries shaped his teaching philosophy. As an early adopter of 1980's technologies such as video and computers, his personal paper journals and unpublished works morphed into video and digital files. By the 1990's, he had mastered electronic publishing. After Y2K he learned about expert systems, knowledge engineering and data mining which signaled that students could access their teachers' libraries online. It was like opening windows to a student's professor's virtual mind. Imagining art students majoring in art taking a Massively Open Online Course - a MOOC - as a distance learning experience, he thought they might be interested in "picking the professor's brain." Maybe they would if they could!On the Internet, buried treasures may await serious students studying art online and given such access as he was in his day. In his "Ritchie Mined" volumes like this one, anyone can drill into his thoughts to read selected musings and perhaps dig up nuggets of wisdom and follow veins of his thinking. His daughter Nellie Sunderland compiled this index of 568 entries for publication both as a paperback and eBook.