Bill H Ritchie

Perfect Studios 'Zine Index Vol. 6 Bill H Ritchie

Imagine you're an art student and you had the run of your art professor's private library of journals, diaries and reading notes. Would you be curious? Bill Ritchie had this experience in college in the 1960's as his art professor gave him the key to her library. It was a privilege only a few of her students enjoyed. After college Bill Ritchie became an art professor. He believes such access to his professors' libraries shaped his teaching philosophy. As an early adopter of new technologies, such as video and computers, his journals and unpublished work morphed into digital files. By the 1990's, he had mastered electronic publishing. He learned about expert systems, knowledge engineering and data mining as ways students could access their teachers' digital libraries. Although long retired from formal college, he imagined what it would be like to be an art student taking art online in a Massively Open Online Course, or MOOC, a distance-learning experience. Would one be interested in picking the art professor's brain? For example, here is one abstract of a Ritchie's 2017 'Zine article: "ps100807 - It All Began in a Cave - The invention of printmaking - The story begins in an undersea cave somewhere on the southern coast of France near what we call Cosquer. Women from a camp above the cave had meetings in the cave, singing, telling stories, and painting on the wall. This was where the first printmaking ... 924 Words. Does this sound interesting? There are hundreds more in this book. On the Internet, buried treasures await students studying art online. It's like having access to all the worlds' art teachers. In the volumes of Ritchie Mined one can drill into this professor's library to mine selections from among his musings. It's like mining for nuggets of wisdom and finding veins of strange thinking. His daughter Nellie Sunderland compiled this index of 561 entries - insights into Professor Ritchie's art and teaching philosophy and his old professor's way.