When I think of artistic research and how I would want my future students to go about artistic research I think of a couple of things. The first thing I think about is finding a good quality way to search for images. I believe that searching through images is a great way to foster visual arts research. If students are working on a visual arts piece, it only makes sense that at the first level of research, their work would center around images and things they can see visually as opposed to textual research, although that should come later, in order to more deeply understand what they are looking at if it is an image that catches their eye as one they might use for inspiration. The second thing that I think would be important for students at the high school level would be a way to keep track of what they've seen so that when they start to branch out into other ideas, they know where their foundation for that idea came from. In order to show this, I think I would want my student to keep some kind of graphic organizer to aid them in their research.
For the first part of this "artistic research", I would recommend a couple of different search engines. The first (and the one many of them would turn to because of comfortability with how it would work), would be dogpile.com. I like this website for if you already know what you're looking for. This website pulls together all the big search engines such as google, yahoo, big, Ask, etc. What I like more specifically about this site however, is that when you begin your search for an image with something such as "Art", the site comes up with ideas that relate to that idea on the side. (AKA it does the branching off of ideas for you in many cases, and can lead you in places you may be interested in seeing, but hadn't thought of.) Another site that may be a little bit more out of student's comfort zones, yet one that I see as being much more beneficial, is StumbleUpon.com. With this website, you simply sign up (for free), and pics topics of websites you want it to let you "stumble upon". For example on mine, I have photography, fine arts, drawing/painting, and dance. When you enter the site, it simply takes you to websites that have to do with those topics. Often times, it brings you to contemporary artist's sites that you never would have happened upon by yourself. All you have to do is click a button that says "stumble" and it brings you to one site after another. You can explore around that site, and if you like it you continue exploring it, and if you don't, you simply click the stumble button again. This is more of an autonomous way of searching, and students would have to spend more time with it, however, it yields much more information, and many more "real" artists than any image search engine would give them. One last web link that I feel I must include is one related to an online magazine I often find things in. This one wouldn't foster as much research, however it would show them that they could use current happenings to influence their art as well. The website is: http://el-chali3f-art.com/category/art-design.
The second part of research in a classroom environment would be a way to show that they actually have done research, as well as a way for them to keep track of their thoughts/finds. For this I have yet another website. This website: http://my.hrw.com/nsmedia/intgos/html/igo.htm is an education based website with many different kids of graphic organizer's which you can pull up, type in, drag images or website links into, or re-arrange. Each one also already comes with blanks at the top for the student's name, class, and date, so they can print it out and turn it in easily. They would also be able to save it to a personal computer to work on later or just have for their notes.
Like I said, I believe the search is the important part of this. Students need to learn that in art, artistic research is not simply going to a library with a pre-concievd topic and picking out every book that has that topic in the title and taking notes out of it. Artistic research can be anything from image searches, to writing down thoughts, to simply playing with materials to figure out what you want to do.
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