Outside of the classroom, but not extracurricular

CUarts created a program called ArtsLink which is designed to enable faculty to easily include arts events in their syllabi.

Here is a fun video explanation of it:




The program is based on the concept that the arts can help connect topics to audiences in a new way. This type of experiential education is valuable in a completely different way from reading a textbook. The program site indicates "Students, like everyone else, respond strongly to questions and themes expressed in a dramatic context, no doubt because drama depends on conflict. Is Hamlet crazy, grief-stricken, or very clever? Why does Hedda Gabler kill herself and her unborn child? Is Mary Stuart a victim of Elizabeth's ambition, or a necessary sacrifice to the stability of an endangered nation? Shakespeare, Ibsen and Schiller make these questions live." And a survey reported that 90 percent of students said the ArtsLink event "strongly" or "somewhat strongly" influenced their understanding of the related topic(s) discussed in class; and 85 percent of faculty reported that the event had a considerable to high degree of academic value. While many music humanities classes use it to take their classes to the opera, there are also many non-arts courses that use it to help their classes explores themes and topics, such as Introduction to the Study of Hispanic Cultures taking their classes to West Side Story, and Globalization and Politics in Africa taking classes to Ruined.

This is a fantastic program and a huge privilege of living in New York: that great art can be a part of your course experience and an excellent teaching tool. But what about the schools across the country that are not located in cultural centers?

For this again digital media can be a useful resource. For example, New U.K. company Digital Theater will make productions from high-profile British troupes including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida, Royal Court Theater, English Touring Theater and the Young Vic available as Internet downloads, and the Met Opera presents live HD broadcasts of its operas throughout the season. These HD recordings and distribution could potentially be replicated with all sorts of dance, music, theater, and broadway performances. These will be useful not just for nationwide broadcasts, but also for individual class and student learning. For example, a school could use its screening room to show an early literature class Classic Stage Company's upcoming production of Age of Iron. Of course its not the same as being there, but I've heard from multiple sources that the Met Opera broadcasts are pretty close, and are very special considering the Met Opera is not available near them. Theater and music classes around the country will obviously want to take advantage of these resources, but it will also be a useful teaching tool for many non-arts classes, giving students the option of being able to experience (sometimes live!) and learn from some of the best performers in the world creating great art.

More on the digital divide

Google held a forum on Wednesday entitled Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age: "A new forum has been designed to advance a new paradigm for learning by harnessing the largely untapped potential of digital media. Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age will bring together 200 of the nation’s top thought leaders in science and technology, informal and formal education, entertainment media, research, philanthropy, and policy to create and act upon a breakthrough strategy for scaling-up effective models of teaching and learning for children. The forum will showcase cutting edge research, proven and promising models to challenge decision-makers in key sectors to help "refresh and reboot" American global leadership in education."

Many speakers spoke of the advantages of equipping schools with the latest in digital technology, and widely distributing computers. As I discussed in a earlier post, many public school teachers have found the access to computers to be so difficult that they feel they cannot incorporate them into class in an efficient and effective way, and cannot assign work on them for homework, because students do not have them at home. Stephanie Olsen in "Will the Digital Divide Close by Itself?" wrote about how during the conference a "spat" broke out on the need to widely distribute the technology:

"Jim Steyer, chief executive of CommonSense Media and co-sponsor of the event, stressed that 'every kid needs to be digitally literate by the 8th grade' and called for a major public education campaign to make that happen. He argued that technology and learning are synonymous and that schools, parents, and kids must get up to speed in the next five years...Immediately after Mr. Steyer’s call to action, Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive of Netflix, contradicted him directly, saying it would take well more than five years to bridge the divide...He said that gaps narrow naturally as the market evolves and prices drop, enabling more people to bring new technology into the home and schools...'We need to shift our expectations' Mr. Hastings said. 'This is a natural part of the evolution of technology.' ”

The speed by which computers need to scale is increasing, and it is reflected in the fact that great efforts are being made to make the technology affordable. Some teachers are using Netbooks and see them as a great step towards distribution.

The technology distribution itself is only half the story. Christensen noted in Disrupting Class that over the past few years, schools went from a ratio of 12 students to 1 computer, to 4 students to 1 computer with no real change in student scores and learning. On the one hand, there really needs to be a ratio of 1 computer to 1 student in order for computers to be incorporated into the classroom permanently and in an effective way. But also, it's not just the technology that needs to be distributed but school reforms must be made so that teachers know how and what to teach using the technology, and lessons and curriculum are changed and restructured to make the best use of it.

Learning 2009

The conference Learning 2009 will be held from November 8-11. It is an interactive, problem-solving, and exploratory conference with over 100 sessions. Some of the main themes relating to new media and web resources include:

Social Learning
e-Learning Update
Global Learning
Learning Systems (LMS)
Mobile Learning
UserContent (How are organizations deploying, harvesting and targeting User Created Content for learning? From organizational "You Tubes" to "Work Around Videos" to collaborative knowledge assets (wiki, Sharepoint and user ratings). How can Learning Designers add value to the User Content resource?)

It has a huge number of discussions on current education topics from using Twitter, the live virtual classroom (and how it can be superior to the physical one), successes and failures of LMS systems, Yum!, Moodle, and also leaps into the future to discuss "The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative" that can help learning domains communicate to each other and incorporate gaming/simulation, social networking, intelligent tutoring and more (http://www.learning2009.com/p7/Learning-2009-Event-Guide-Web.pdf, page 23). If you can, go! This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for any educator or leader to learn the tools and skills and information that will be provided throughout these four days. For all of us who can't physically be there, it would be great if they followed their own advice and posted videos of the sessions, in the interest of global, social, and open learning. And while who doesn't appreciate Abba and sound bites, full videos would be much more helpful. (Maybe these few podcasts - from their sponsors - are a start.)

35 million; like college students around free pizza at a dorm meeting

The modern hippie mother on Gossip Girl this week, who cares more about solar panels, unions and co-ops than her daughter’s private college education, repeatedly announced that “knowledge shouldn’t be for sale.”

MIT OpenCourseWare agrees with her. We have discussed how computer tools and TEAL can increase the customization and one-on-one learning possibilities of teacher to student, but another important possibility of digital media and web resources for education is the drastically lower cost and the ability for one teacher to teach millions at once through broadcasting knowledge and courses through the internet. For public schools cost is not an issue from kindergarten up until high school, but once you get into the undergraduate and graduate levels, cost can frequently determine what school you will go to, and then what profession you will go into afterwards in order to pay back your loans.

When most people think of the free university offerings the first thing that comes to mind is iTunes U "the world’s greatest collection of free educational media... with over 200,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement." But compared to MIT, iTunes U was late into the game (launched May 30, 2007). In 2000, MIT decided to publish their material online and make it widely available for free in order "to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware." This was controversial, many professors felt that they were giving away their "intellectual property" to the world for free. vs. those that felt this was an incredible social good (MIT OpenCourseWare).

MIT's OpenCourseWare includes syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams, and over 1,000 hours of lecture videos for nearly all graduate and undergraduate courses at MIT. 35 million people have used the courses (14 million of which used it in translated languages), from 220 countries around the globe. The program was launched in 2001 and today there are almost 2,000 courses online. The social good is obvious: 35 million people learning more to help them with their fields, and outside of their fields, teachers learning lessons from other teachers, students exploring new subjects to help them decide what they want to study, and much more. It is also helpful for schools with much fewer resources, for example schools in Africa, with very low budgets that can't afford textbooks, but with MIT OCW they can get a host of assignments and curricula that was never before available.

Once you don't have to aggregate a teacher with several students in a room, the costs drop tremendously. "Forcing people to aggregate is a massive cost inefficiency that people will quickly grow tired of bearing when they realize other options are available...Teachers could scale via podcasting... one great podcast of just ten minutes can equate to thousands of hours of learning as subscribers all over the world automatically receive these recording without lifting a finger
(VentureBeat: Web technology is about to change how we learn).

Providing knowledge for free has wonderful social benefits, but knowledge and universities are not the same thing. If the knowledge continues to be given away for free, or people begin to believe that what is provided by universities should be free (like online news), will universities go the way of journalism? Oh lord, I hope not. They are the centers of much scientific and social research that benefits the world. The fact that the tuitions of thousands of students pay for the greatest professors and grad students to do this research is a necessary benefit for all. This pooling of resources is needed in order for very expensive research to be done. While Wikipedia may work because no one needs to be an expert in order to accomplish a great deal, to discover "pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" (Nobel Physics Prize 2002) requires great professors from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tokyo, and Associated Universities Inc. of Washington, DC who are given the financial and academic (and grad student) resources needed to research and experiment. Try working on cosmic neutrinos from your wiki or blog. If people do feel that the tuition is too high, and that they can get for free on the internet what someone would have to pay $45,000 to get from MIT, I hope that a new financial model will evolve that will continue to provide for the continuing study and research that come from universities.

MIT presents: Technology Enhanced Active Learning

One fear of the use of technology in the classroom is the thought of rows of students staring at computer screens, not interacting with the teacher or with each other. While computers do need to be available to every student and will no doubt become an important part of the classroom experience, their function in the classroom will be to increase connection and learning, not remove interaction.

The technology should free up the teacher and the students to make the most out of classtime. This means that instead of classroom time being spent with long lectures, that students may or may not attend, and may or may not be awake during, where students copy copius amounts of notes from a blackboard, and where professors speak non-stop for the entire class length, that instead the teacher could do what they went into teaching for: provide inspiration to their students, share their love and excitement about the material with the class, and communicating in a multitude of ways with each individual student in order to translate the knowledge. The inspiration, excitement and human connection with individual students will never be able to be substituted by a computer, and great teachers can help students learn in extraordinary ways. In addition, technology in the classroom can help students connect with each other, for small group and project based work, creating team work, and allowing students to assist each other with their various strengths and problem areas. This is the strength of the classroom: where the teacher can connect with the students and the students can help each other- not 45 minutes of note taking. Long lectures and reading are great prep for a class, but not for classtime itself. This is the idea behind the technology enhanced classroom.


This is particularly necessary for those certain classes, for example mathematics and the mathematics based sciences, where no amount of reading or listening to long lectures will help you understand it. You just have to do it. Enter MIT and their Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL).

TEAL was created initially for MIT's freshman physics course which was a large lecture taught to 300 students: "Despite great lecturers, attendance at MIT's freshman physics course dropped to 40% by the end of the term, with a 10% failure rate... Traditional lectures, although excellent for many purposes, do not convey concepts well because of their passive nature." The creators of TEAL reformatted the teaching of freshman physics at MIT with a new mix of pedagogy, technology, and classroom design. TEAL classrooms include 13 round tables each seating 9 students with instructors at the center of the class. Whiteboards and eight video projectors surround the room. Groups are formed by mixing students of varying levels of knowledge to "facilitate peer instruction" Instructors deliver short 20-minute lectures with discussion questions, visualizations, and pencil-and-paper exercises. Students use animated simulations designed to help them visualize concepts, and carry out experiments in groups during class. "Instructors periodically ask questions, which students discuss and answer through an electronic polling system with handheld voting keypads. Instructors no longer lecture from a fixed location, but walk around with a wireless microphone talking to students about their work, assessing their understanding, facilitating interaction, and promoting better learning...The teaching methods used in the TEAL classroom produced about twice the average normalized learning gains for low-, intermediate-, and high-scoring students when compared to traditional instruction. " The New York Times reported: "Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent." (At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard)

TEAL provides active vs. passive learning, one-on-one interactions with the professor and students, students engaged in group projects, and students voting on questions so that the professor has immediate feedback on how well the class is understanding the material. Check out a video of TEAL in action: http://web.mit.edu/edtech/videos/mit-Teal1-220k-ref.mov

Interview with Alex Rigopulos, creator of Guitar Hero and RockBand

On Monday, October 19, 2009, Carnegie Hall held a panel discussion on "The video game and music revolution." Panelists included founding father of hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash, Alex Rigopulos, the co-founder and CEO of Harmonix, which created the games Guitar Hero and RockBand, Christopher Tin, a composer for video games, film, and advertising, Meghan Asha, an on-air technologist specialist for NBC and Fox News, host of TMI weekly, and a tech-focused blogger, and Melissa Auf der Maur, a mixed-media artist who rose to prominence during the 1990s with stints in the bands The Smashing Pumpkis and Hole. The discussion was moderated by Pete Wentz, the bassist and lyricist of the multi-plantinum selling band Fall Out Boy.

During the event the positive assessment of video games and playing games like Guitar Hero for music and music education was clear. The panelists loved the fact that Guitar Hero was like a "virtual jukebox" introducing songs from older generations to today's children. Composer Christopher Tin has written pieces for video games that are now performed in the world tour of Video Games Live, a touring show which uses local choruses and orchestras to play video game music, and which has successfully introduced many in the next generation to orchestral music.

Alex Rigopulos is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonix, which started as a music software company trying to provide a music playing experience. He said that the feeling of playing music is great, but the frustration of trying to play when you aren't very talented, or don't have the time, or patience can be "prohibitively difficult." Harmonix wanted to invent a new way for people to feel what it feels like to play music. Harmonix discovered several years into its existence that video games might be the way to achieve this, and could be a means to that end. Since Guitar Hero was released, millions of people have had the experience of engaging and making music in a new way. It's clear to Rigopolus that Guitar Hero has proven its use as "not an education tool, but an inspirational tool" since tons of new people are learning instruments, and they have heard from many teachers how many new students have come to them wanting to learn instruments. In RockBand, by playing the various voices of a piece (drums, guitar, bass, voice) the player is able to learn the piece in a much deeper way: hear textures, voicing, instrumental lines, and structures that they may never have had the skills or interest to listen to before. What used to be a "wash of sound" to a person, can now be heard in the way a musician hears a piece. Its use as an educational tool to learn an instrument is limited to some extent: the guitar playing is a far off approximation of what it feels like to play guitar, but the singing is actual singing and the game does provide feedback on whether you are sharp or flat, and the drumming is an accurate simulation of drumming.

When I spoke with Alex Rigopulos following the discussion, he expanded on his ideas regarding Guitar Hero, RockBand, and music education:

EM: Do you have a music background?

AR: Yes, I was a composer in undergrad and was in the computer music program at MIT.

EM: What is the RockBand Network that you mentioned this evening?

AR: The RockBand Network will launch in a couple of months. It's a program that will enable anyone to turn their song into a song in RockBand, downloadable by any player.

EM: There was such an interesting diversity in the panelists and music tonight.

AR: Well, the diversity of music in RockBand is important because of the variety of tastes out there, you need to have that variety in order to reach out to the most people.

EM: Programs like Guitar Rising and Jam Sessions are similar to Guitar Hero but are much more directly aimed at education. Do you see the possibility of moving towards making more specifically educational tools?

AR: No, because as soon as you move towards an educational tool as opposed to entertainment, you are going to lose a lot of people. But to the extent that we can sneak in some education value into the game, then that's great.

EM: So you don't see Guitar Hero being played in schools?

AR: No, but it's great if Guitar Hero can bridge the divide between education and entertainment, especially as the education is being lost in schools.

EM: I know I personally felt lucky to have music education growing up, which is being cut all over the country.

AR: Yes it's tragic. That's why I'm here tonight, because I'm passionate about music education, which is what the Weill school provides.

EM: Do you see anymore instruments being added to the game in the future? Rock flute? Clarinet?

AR: Absolutely. This is just the beginning.

[NB: The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall creates broad-reaching music education programs, playing a central role in Carnegie Hall's commitment to making great music accessible to as many people as possible through creative musical interaction and inspiring lifelong learning. The above is a summary of our conversation.]

Video Games 2: Guitar Hero, RockBand, Guitar Rising, StarPlayIt, Jam Sessions

Another of Christensen's complaints about the current classroom/textbook learning system is that they are created by an academic clique of experts who tend to all be in the same type of the eight intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, as well as all have the same learning style: visual, oral, written, practice, etc. Digital media and web based technologies would be able to be customized to each student's strength and present the material in a way where he/she can understand it best.

This is an interesting way of looking at Guitar Hero, as translating what can be intimidating music and aural qualities into video game visual ones.

Games like Guitar Hero and RockBand enable people to be engaged in a type of "creation" of music that was never before possible. While to learn how to read music well can take months, and to learn an instrument well can take years, you can pick up Guitar Hero's plastic "guitar" and start rocking out to Muse and Metallica within minutes. But is it music making? Ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller calls it a unique 3rd thing - not the same as creating music, but the player does need to use rhythm and meter, and various guitar attributes (use of fast-fingering hammer-ons and pull-offs and the use of the whammy bar to alter the pitch of notes), AND the player is far more engaged with the music than they would be if they were just listening to tunes on their iPod.

It can be challenging to see how the new technologies can apply to learning a physical instrument, but it is clear that the more academic type of music classes can definitely benefit from online and digital technologies. For example Music History classes can use blogs, wikis, forums, and online coursework. In a similar vein, Florida Virtual School already offers AP Art History as one of its courses. Courses such as ear training and music theory can also benefit. There are many online resources and computer programs that can teach the theory, enhance the coursework, and provide testing capabilities that were never available before. For example there is ear training online programs that can help in training with dictation. It is really difficult to try and practice dictation on your own by closing your eyes while hitting a piano (believe me, I've tried). So there are many ways that digital media and online education can enhance music education, with resources from Earope to even downloading free sheet music.

So new technologies have clearly enhanced academic and ear training music classes. And also, video games Guitar Hero and RockBand have taught a generation how to listen in a new way, work on rhythm and meter, and sing and play in accordance with visual cues. Can new education media and/or video game technologies also be used to teach real instruments?

There are a few products trying to do just that:

Guitar Rising is a music video game where the player plays a real guitar as cued by the game’s visuals. Following rock music sequences and streaming notes, players play guitar melodies and rhythms. Beginner difficulty levels are designed for non-guitar players and hard difficulties will challenge experienced guitarists.

StarPlayit is a multi-award winning music technology company delivering platforms for online musical performance and participation. StarPlayit's technology provides its products with the ability to listen to a musical performance, on a real analogue instrument, and make real time judgments on pitch, tone, timing, duration and dynamics.

Jam Sessions: "Jam Sessions is a ground-breaking music experience that transforms the Nintendo DS system into a portable guitar. Players will literally strum the guitar via the Touch Screen and select chords with the +Control Pad. Now even the most “non-musical” person can become an instant rock star!" Customisability is an important part of Jam Sessions and extends all the way to the guitar's effects, allowing you to adjust your chorus and strum volume, tremolo, and high cut to create a custom sound. The game description touts "Not a Musician? No problem. Advanced tutorial modes allow novice musicians to learn how to play guitar without paying for lessons! Additional modes will help users understand chord progressions and train them to recognize chords by ear."

While Guitar Hero and RockBand are gateway musical engagements that can lead to enhanced listening, greater physical and emotional engagement, and possibly the desire to learn an instrument, they are not tools for the classroom and homework because they do not actually teach you skills involving reading music or playing an instrument. However, games such as Jam Session, Guitar Rising and StarPlayIt have the potential to teach chords and melodies, and gain feedback on your instrument performance. These games can teach some basic skills to millions of Nintendo DS owners, a much wider audience which before was limited because of both financial resources and musical interest/ability. Although it may not be for the classroom, if after playing Guitar Hero it is not as intimidating to pick up a real guitar and you find the act of music participation really fun, this helps towards the creation of the intrinsic motivation to do the real thing.