Better late than never... Interactivity #4

After all sorts of nonsense trying to redraft and resubmit this assignment (originally it reposted to 2011, then I accidentally deleted it) here is Interactivity #4.

Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmJL5kf39jyJdHZnbk4yYU8zakhZN2dhUENGb3RqT0E

http://willkuhn.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/tutorial-creating-a-breakbeat-style-song-in-ableton-live/

Lesson plan originally by Will Kuhn
1. NJCCCS Standards:

Common, recognizable musical forms often have characteristics related to specific cultural traditions.

1.1.8.B.1 Analyze the application of the elements of music in diverse Western and non-Western musical works from different historical eras using active listening and by reading and interpreting written scores.

Compositional techniques used in different styles and genres of music vary according to prescribed sets of rules.

1.1.8.B.2 Compare and contrast the use of structural forms and the manipulation of the elements of music in diverse styles and genres of musical compositions.

2. Teaching Strategies prescribed in this lesson plan:
-Research (Finding drum breaks from the 70’s funk tradition for audio samples)
-Media Production (Students create an authentic musical work from the ‘breakbeat’ tradition using the prescribed sets of rules for that musical style.
-Lecture (Teacher has a list of steps to take to create a final product)

3. Research is more student-centered because it makes the student responsible for learning and participating in finding the right audio for the music he/she will create. It would become more teacher-centered if the teacher simply gave all the students one audio sample to work with.

Lecture is teacher-centered because it focuses on what the teacher knows, not the questions or needs of the students as much.

What becomes more student centered in this lesson is that the teacher asks the students to apply the styles and concepts in the lesson on their own after the teacher has demonstrated. In step five, the teacher turns the students loose to create their own supporting instrument tracks after the foundational concept has been achieved, which in this case is the “breakbeat”.

Step six is very student centered – after the students complete their tracks, they are asked to perform it for their other students. This also adds a dimension of authentic practice to their music making and covers the different skills of composition, arranging, and performing.

Final Project

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmJL5kf39jyJdE0wNkNWVWMwTl9ZcXk3eW55VkhmY3c

     Originally in this lesson, I had students watching a video of a performance that they would replicate the percussion element on non-standard instruments. What I decided first that would enhance the experience of non-standard instruments and performing music within a specific context is connecting the performance to other musical groups and traditions through online media. Websites like YouTube and SoundCloud aggregate recommended links and similar artists based on the content of a video. Students would benefit from doing their own research/inquiry into the genre on music, and find other artists and performers they like and do not like. By doing this, not only will they be well informed on the stylistic aspects of a tradition, but be able to compare and contrast different artists and their performances. This will help later on in the class when the students are performing sections of the piece in a group. As a mini-assignment or homework, students would write and compare a few artists of their choice within that genre of music. To do this, they would also need to research a bit about its history and context.

  I have chosen mostly formative and student-based assessments, because I feel music classrooms thrive when the experiences and needs of students come before a scripted curriculum. Everyone loves music, but many students do not get involved in school music programs because they don't offer anything that is meaningful or relevant to how they engage with music outside school. We need to shift the paradigm from believing students need to learn all the nuts and bolts (music theory, performance techniques) before they can have a meaningful music making experience. I am not saying to ignore notation or performance techniques, but they are largely the entrance point to a music class, and become the focus of classes as well. This ignores the other aspects of music making often -- conducting, arranging, improvising, and composing. A student-based and more formative assessed class allows for these other aspects of musicianship to thrive. I have enhanced that experience by including ways for students to research and inquire about the topics on their own, and also be able to monitor their own progress via recording software such as garageband. With the use of social networking websites that are based around music, such as soundcloud or last.fm, students can also share music with each other they have discovered, and critique each other's performances. This would of course have to be monitored by the teacher, as bullying is a hot issue in education right now. Part of this can be solved by establishing a safe environment in the classroom, and then extending that to an online space.

     Another enhancement to this lesson involves using recording software during performance. Students would record themselves playing individually or in groups, then refer to the recording to evaluate their own progress. Furthermore, students who need help in particular areas such as melodic or rhythmic enforcement, or "global listening", which I define as the ability to listen to multiple musical lines and information beyond one's own part, would benefit from the garageband "virtual band" feature. This feature creates an accompaniment of software instruments. Students would "solo" or mute tracks to hear individual parts of a song to hear how their part fits into a whole. Zooming from micro to macro, playing in time with a click track, and evaluating their own progress will be a more student-centered experience than direct instruction where the teacher is constantly critiquing. Students become more responsible for their own learning when they have the resources to check themselves -- even the simplicity of having tuners and metronomes embedded in most software is a small step towards fluency. The more common model in a traditional music class is for the teacher to be waving his/her arms around, and telling students explicitly when they are wrong.

To enhance the inquiry/research of different musical traditions, students could do something similar to what our technology class has done -- online participation. Soundcloud, Last.fm, YouTube, and blogs all have the capability of creating online music communities. Particularly Soundcloud has the ability to create groups that students can join and post audio streams of music they want to share with the rest of the class. This gives every student, with one-click simplicity, the ability to share and learn what the rest of the class is interested in. Students who can network with the ease of sharing streamed music this way would quickly aggregate library collections of music they were interested in, and that relates to the lesson material.

TED launches education YouTube channel, does what school administrators could only dream of.

http://education.ted.com/

Today TED unveiled its new education channel, which allows anyone (but specifically, teachers) to upload educational videos, lectures, or tutorials to their channel.

So what, you might ask?

The videos "flip" over to more content such as quizzes (or review), discussion forums, and extra content and materials. Right in the same video. It's an education miracle!

Go tell your administrators and co-op teachers about this new amazing service before every else knows about it. You'll look cooler doing so now before the hipster teachers like me start saying, "Oh, I knew about TED education the day it launched..."

I may even post a few educational videos myself in the future!

What's it like to teach Max/MSP to high schoolers?

Will Kuhn posts about the importance of teaching routing and object-based programming via the music application Max/MSP

http://willkuhn.com/2012/04/15/whats-it-like-to-teach-maxmsp-to-high-schoolers/

"High schoolers can learn “advanced” music tech stuff, so long as you’re willing to learn it yourself and teach it to them.  I’ve had multiple students over the years contact me during college thanking me for teaching them patching.  Why?  Either they’re in a music tech class and already know how to do the advanced stuff, or they’re in an engineering class using Matlab or something else extremely similar to Live.  Others who go into computer science are basically familiar with logic routing and object oriented programming concepts.

In an age where music classes don’t usually apply to the “applicable” world for most students, stuff like this is an awesome experience to give your students."

I would like to point out that MSU has a music technology course that teaches basic Max/MSP programming, and it is an invaluable skill when mastered. It is my hope that the music program continues to allow this division to grow.

I feel Mr. Kuhn has a great point -- teaching advanced concepts to high schoolers is the same thing as teaching it to anyone. We may use different examples or vocabulary while teaching it, but the concepts remain the same. Educators need to get past thinking "it's just too difficult for my students" to "how can I make this less difficult for my students to comprehend?"

In an age where school is becoming less and less valuable, and college undergrads as my self are graduating with a 50% jobless rate, we need to rethink public schooling before the bubble bursts. I think engineering, and these more practical and hands-on approaches to our subjects are a step in the right direction.

Interactivity #5

#1:

My cooperating teacher was only familiar with NETS, but was not knowledgable in specific standards. His reaction, upon looking at the standards for his grade level, was that he was already implementing most of the concepts and standards anyways. My cooperating teacher does a technology based music course, and so students are constantly using computers. Besides teaching music, he often takes time to strengthen their computer skills through assigned projects. For example, during a podcasting unit last semester, the students were unfamiliar with formatting documents in microsoft word, as well as checking their sources for validity in researching. We spent thirty minutes that day reinforcing good formatting and search skills.

#2:

I can only speak for Randolph High School ,in terms of implementation of NETS -- This has been my single placement for fieldwork and student teaching. Randolph throws a lot of their excess money into technology, however most teachers are not trained or aware of NETS in their lesson planning. The school is so large that classroom access to technology varies from mac labs to room that don’t even have a projector. RHS also uses blackboard and genesis, which in theory could be used to achieve some NETS objectives, however most students barely use it or not at all. Students rarely check their emails, either. Overall, the culture of the school with use of technology is poor, but with pockets of rich classes such as the mass media department, or my music technology classes.

#3:

I was not surprised with my teacher’s responses because he is in his 60’s and has gone through dozens of standards and policy changes. Over the course of my fieldwork and student teaching I have discovered that many concepts such as “transfer” and “best practice” have been around for a very long time, but were just coined to be different terms in different pedagogical texts. I was shown some of these older standards and texts by my co-op. Overall, I speak with my co-op on the significance of technology in education every day (I teach a music technology course right now five days a week). A lot of our work relies on the concept of transferability, that a student who learns a concept will carry that skill to foreign situations, and synthesize it with other concepts. I tend to teach the concepts behind programs and computers more so than the software itself, because software is always changing. My co-op and I feel this is still a risk because “transfer” is still merely a pedagogical theory and has not been scientifically proven to be true.

#4:

I believe that simply stating something like, “You’re supposed to be implementing NETS, you should look at this website” would get absolutely nothing done in my school district, or with my peers. I think it all starts with genuine conversation about where our students’ interests and strengths lie, and how the standards are suggestions to enhance curriculums. For example, I recently used www.polleverywhere.com with my students for a quiz review. I did this to demonstrate to my co-op a quick and free way (without smartboard) to use tech to make review more fun. Poll everywhere allows students to submit via text message their answers to multiple choice questions anonymously. The students were much more engaged seeing the percentage of different answers across the classroom. Without the fear of being wrong (anonymous is great!) I was able to then determine which misconceptions in the content were prevalent and review the best answers with everyone. What I am saying is -- lead by example! When peers and other teachers see you do meaningful things with technology, they are likely to follow suit. If you make tech use a gimmick, teachers who are less comfortable will not join in.

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Link to my spreadsheet from Interactivity #4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmJL5kf39jyJdHZnbk4yYU8zakhZN2dhUENGb3RqT0E

College Students are Bad at Google

Read an interesting article at Mashable on students and google: http://mashable.com/2011/08/22/the-google-gap-college-kids-arent-good-at-searching-study/

It also links back to this article: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/22/erial_study_of_student_research_habits_at_illinois_university_libraries_reveals_alarmingly_poor_information_literacy_and_skills

“It wasn’t so much that students were inefficient in their use of Google, but rather that students are often ill-equipped to sufficiently evaluate or refine the results that are returned,” says Andrew Asher, an anthropologist at Bucknell University and one of the project leads. “…I don’t think this is a problem limited to students.”

“They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results,” adds an article on the study by Inside Higher Ed. “Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)”

Just want to say that I deal with this every day. For being the children supposedly born ready to use technology, my current students are awful at researching, word processing, and file management in general. They are also the first generation to have gone from beginning to finish in the No Child Left Behind program.

These kids can't think critically and have been spoon fed information for tests and from basic search queries their whole lives. They need to be asked much more often to read in context and question the validity of what they read about.

Of course, this is only one study... but I have a confirmation bias because the majority of my students have this issue.

Democracy is worthless with an uninformed public.

Second thoughts on online collaboration

I have been reading a book called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". The book deals with the fact that one third to one half of all of us are introverts, and yet we live in a culture that is increasingly favorable to extroverts. Our schools and businesses are built to favor and to create extroverted people. Our celebrities are gregarious people, etc etc.

One of the ideas in the book I found relevant to this course was a chapter on "New Groupthink", which was a concept that started as internet collaboration became easier. Business executives saw how open source coding (when the DNA of a computer program is shared so all can edit and build on it) improved creativity and productivity. It was thought by businesses (and eventually schools) that the best things happen in group work. The problem is that the exact opposite is true.

"Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs. The same is true of academic research—professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.

Page(s): 110-110, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

NOOKstudy (Matthew Pietrucha, truedatkey@gmail.com). This material is protected by copyright.

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So perhaps our group project wouldn't have turned out any better (or perhaps worse) if we had collaborated in person. Personally, I have always hated group work. But I enjoy working online.

Susan Cain may have a point for more online work and less face-to-face group work.

Bjork's Biophelia Apps: The future of music and education?

Bjork released just last year a suite of apps corresponding to each track of her new album, Biophelia. The album tries to unify and plain clear the interactions of nature, music, and technology. Each app allows the user to interact with the music and the ideas in the subject matter of the song. For instance, the song "Virus" involves the user having to submit or be taken over by the virus DNA to complete the song. "Moon" features an elliptical based generative music sequencer that also has MIDI-out. This allows users to use the application to control other electronic instruments.

Bjork has commented in interviews that this project for her served to satisfy "the frustrated music teacher" inside of her. Bjork studied music at a school in Iceland for ten years.

Biophelia will appear as part of an education program touring major cities along with Bjork's live performances of the album. The applications, used on iPads, will be used to teach younger students about nature, music, and technology in an integrated little package that is fun and creative.

Is this the future of music (and other subject area) education? It's a bit simplistic to argue about, but I believe the approach of integrating multiple subjects into a fun and intuitive medium is a large step in the right direction. Why can't we learn music through history? Or learn music through science? Or learn art through phys ed? We don't teach subject areas in the grand scheme of things anyways -- we teach disciplines.

The apps are about $2 a piece, or $10 for the entire suite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dikvJM__zA4

Interactivity #3

• The group process required by this interactivity. Was it authentic collaborative?

I have my doubts that this was authentically collaborative. Communicating via e-mail and the chat window in Google Docs was not the most efficient or authentic way to do this -- nothing beats face-to-face interaction yet. I found it extremely frustrating to set up a document that everyone could edit. We had to create three different documents before one worked out for us. Also, the concept of "cultural transformation" was deleted after I submitted it. I felt this was important to highlight.

• What about the final inventory that emerged? Do you have any thoughts on these technologies as a collective for your particular content area?

A lot of these resources are the same old garbage, different package. There's nothing transformative in ordering music scores online or using notation software. I feel education has barely skimmed the surface on how technology could impact learning. As music educators, we have roughly a 20% participation rate by secondary school. That leaves an 80% of the school that will have no music experiences in secondary school -- this is simply unacceptable. The definition of insanity, put by Einstein, is "doing the same thing and expecting different results".

If you really want to transform education with technology, you need to stop thinking inside the band/chorus/orchestra paradigm. There's nothing inherently wrong with these programs, but they simply do not reach the majority of students. It is my belief that every student, as part of being an educated citizen in a democracy, needs to participate in music. And bypassing, or ignoring the student's prior experiences, culture, and interests outside of school is not the way to do it.

The best technologies on this spreadsheet were the ones which enable students to immediately create music, regardless of their music literacy. Students don't always (and I'm being nice here) want to study how to read music or practice an instrument for five hours a day before any "real" music making can begin. They just want to do. And they learn by doing.

And what these mobile apps like iMaschine, Reactable, Garageband for iPad, etc. have in common is that at least they give the opportunity for students to do more than simply perform and listen -- they can improvise, compose, and conduct in small ensembles. These skills are ignored by the majority of band programs, and it's educational malpractice and unrealistic in today's society (How many people are going to join a professional orchestra after school? Also, who says that being a highly qualified music ed teacher has anything to do with the ability to perform music? It's rubbish.)

• How might this technology inventory serve your purposes (if at all) in CURR 314 and READ 411 this semester?

I've already taken these classes -- I have not used these technologies for either classes specifically.

I believe the iBook author (textbooks) and kindle would make a huge impact on READ 411.

On a broader level, my READ 411 teacher was very focused on making all course materials and content relatable and meaningful to all students. I believe technology holds some of the keys to accomplishing this. That is, only if educators are willing to look ahead and take some risks with these devices and programs -- many schools are still banning the use of cell phones (sexting seems to be a big deal in the media right now), but they are truly an invaluable resource.

We need to think about the role of education in the 21st century in general -- schools are no longer designed to fit the needs of our students. They are outdated, largely prison-like, and built from this factory line, industrial era mentality.

So what I'm getting at is, our technology in general is only a fraction of transforming education. What needs to happen first is a fundamental change in how educators perceive and use technology. Without a change in our attitude and willingness to adapt these things, they will remain a novelty item.

Interactivity #2

The phonograph forever changed music from a service industry to a commodity based one.

Will Apple's iBooks author revolutionize textbooks and education?

Apple's new iBooks Author has the potential to change education. It allows the user to drag and drop entire PDF or word documents into a program. It then auto-formats the text to fit the page. The user can then customize the font, layout, add videos, create study guides, notes, and formative assessment like mock-exams and practice questions. It's super interactive and seems stupidly easy to use.

But while students would love to carry a shiny iPad instead of a heavy backpack, schools don't seem likely to catch on to this craze for some time to come. I'd argue that a single classroom of iPads would fair well in price against the costs of paper and printing for a semester. In college, a $500 iPad is cheaper than a semester of books, given the books sell back for nothing.

Apple has priced some of the textbooks as low as $15. That's insanely low for a textbook these days. Unfortunately, one cannot read the textbook without an iPad or iPhone.

One more drawback with iBooks is that textbooks have been given a 2gb limit. This leaves larger anthologies, and media-heavy resources will be left behind or missing lots of content.

Overall, I am looking forward to seeing if Apple will advance the textbook industry into the 21st century. I am also curious to see if the ease of publishing directly to iBooks will democratize the publishing and writing culture.

Just letting iPhone and Android people know there is a blogger app that is free. I'm posting from it right now. This should make it a little easier for people to participate.

Best

Matt