Introducing the blog's weekly Flipboard, a new and more user-friendly way
to gather and share weekly information in a dynamic format.

One of the activities I enjoy each morning over coffee is combing through my various social media feeds to find out what information and links colleagues, friends, students, and other users I am following are sharing and circulating. It is always interesting to see what is trending in various fields I am interested in, especially the art and post secondary education worlds, and to track how certain stories are progressing over time. Many of my blog posts are in fact sparked by conversations I see emerging over social media. Several months into starting my blog, I began sharing some of the links I was finding especially worthy of reflection, mostly items I favourited on Twitter (still my favourite source for art and culture related news/info), and shared them on my Weekly Twitter Round Ups.

During the hiatus from my blog, I began researching more useful and time-saving ways to collect all the bits of info I was amassing in various spots on my computer, phone, and tablet into one place. While transitioning to my iPad, I discovered the app that many of you may already know about-- Flipboard.

Flipboard allows users to create personal magazines by collecting, editing, and sharing information they "flip" into their account. Content can be streamed from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and any number of news feed sources. To date, the application is available on Apple, Android, and select e-reader devices and you can also download a Flipboard bookmarklet to your computer to capture info you may find browsing at your desk.

Voila! I thought-- this would be the perfect way to deliver the Weekly Round-Up in a visually dynamic and interactive way. And so, each week, I will be amassing information into the blog's Flipboard magazine. I am still playing around with how I will organize the issues (be it into a monthly digest or simply a new one each week), but I will change the cover each week to reflect an art-related news story that is on my mind a part of the broader public conversation. To access the magazine, you can download the mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire or Nook devices and search for "Dorothy Barenscott" in the catalogue or get the download link sent to your email . Unfortunately there is no way to view the magazine on a computer yet (I hear rumours of a Google Chrome extension-- I will keep you posted!), so I will work to link a few items each week directly in the blog post. Inside this first magazine, you will find 18 items-- this will be an evolving format, but for now I have included sources from a variety of social media formats and types (images, video, articles, e-books etc..). So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and flip through the collection of links in this week's round-up. I look forward to assembling new items each week and sharing them with you.

For the front of my inaugural weekly Flipboard round-up, I chose artist Ai Weiwei's somewhat controversial cover art for the latest edition of Time Magazine. Ai's graphic work-- using the Chinese art of paper cutting-- was chosen to grace the cover of the iconic American weekly news magazine to accompany reporter Hannah Beech's lead story "How China Views the World." With the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests occurring this past week (see historic video clip below), along with the two-day California Summit between American and Chinese leaders also happening this weekend, the move was a very bold one for the publication. With continued protests in both Turkey and Syria raging, and questions of human rights abuses at the forefront of many activists minds, it also seems a very opportune time to bring Ai Weiwei's art and message to such a wide reading audience.