MusEDLab Weekly Update – 3/3/2014

Hi all,

I hope you had a good weekend! Here’s a quick update on things for this week…

 

I will only be in town Monday (today) and Tuesday this week. Wednesday-Saturday I’ll be in Boston at the DML 2014 conference participating in a Panel on Thursday called Play With Your MOOC with my colleagues at the MIT Media Lab and P2PU. Ethan will be getting a major shout out in the presentation, too! 🙂  BTW, if you aren’t already subscribed to updates to Ethan’s blog, do so ASAP – http://ethanhein.com/. His posts on reforming the teaching of music theory are gaining serious press and traction across social media recently. Congrats!

 

@Jamie and @Jay…. Thanks for your progress on the Blog with the online learning and MOOC literature reviews. I am now in possession of the hard copies of the original two research handbooks in music education. I am in need of some scanning assistance with those, so if you have some free time today, drop me an email so that I can make sure to leave them for you. I will be out of the office around mid-day because I’m giving a presentation on the MusEDLab, PWYM MOOC, and the MusicDelta interactive multitracks to the Tisch Clive Davis faculty. I should be back in my office after 1pm.

 

Also, we should schedule a whiteboard session around the online music learning stuff. I am happy if you all would give it a go yourselves. I think it would be interesting to see what you see in the lit without my biases. I can leave a key for my office if you’d like to use my board. Just be sure to take photos along the way and post them to the blog.

 

Along those lines, we need to add some more literature to our To Summarize bin:

The complete works of:

• Matthew Thibeault
• Steve Dillon (we already have a lot of this)
• Evan Tobias
• Jonathan Savage
• Marina Gall
• Don Lebler/Paul Draper (the peer mentoring, higher education, popular music stuff)

This will be an ongoing project, so I’ll add these names to the Trello so that they’re easily found.  As you continue to do the lit review/blog posting work, please think about what might be the best visual format for presenting the data we’re logging in the blog posts. I’d like the collective intelligence that we’re developing to be easily accessible to other students and researchers (and teachers). We may be able to lean on MM Music Tech student Alex Marse to implement a web-based database that we can import our WordPress blog posts into for more easy manipulation, tagging, search, and visualization. We eventually want to build a comprehensive database of research in music education technology first with the core work, then filling it out more completely over time.

@ethan … we continue to make progress on licensing the PG tracks for PWYM 2.0. Vanessa just opened up new functionality in the course scheduler so that we can copy the HTML from the first set of emails. We need to load those somewhere (here?) for editing and updating for the PG version of the course. I’m working on getting you access to that site so that that work can begin. 🙂

@Ethan has created some new PWYM Music Theory videos and uploaded them to our PWYM YouTube page. If you haven’t had the chance yet, please check them out. They are based on earlier blog posts of his. We’d love your feedback on them and also for what other videos we might want to add to our set.

Also, here is a link to P2PU’s recent white paper on assessment online and the link to our draft PWYM whitepaper. The PWYM whitepaper will go live soon, so please take a look over it and give me your feedback at our meeting tomorrow.

@Adam has made some good progress this past week on the MIDI MaKey MaKey work. I will have some face-to-face time with Eric Rosenbaum in Boston later this week. If we have any questions for him around this project, please share them. He’s been working on an audio sample chip that would enable us to have high quality sounds built in to the MIDI MaKey MaKey. I’ll take some video of that from Boston and post it to the blog.

Reading Group

One thing I would like to start after next week is to have all of us as a group read 1-2 articles/chapters each week together and spend time discussing them at our weekly meeting. @Jay, @Jamie, & @Ethan…. since you’ve all been doing a lot of reading/lit reviewing, could you please each suggest two articles/chapters that you’ve come across that you’d like us to read and discuss as a group? I’ll augment your list with some things on my mind, we’ll then create a reading schedule and go from there. 🙂

Summary of Weekly Work

To help me keep track of what you’re working on, could you please send me a bullet-point outline of what you’ve worked on each week by Monday? I think I might want to move to a Google Doc/web-based solution for this so that we can all just simply update as we go through each week. I’m thinking of setting this up as an embedded doc within a perma page in the blog. If you have suggestions about how to make this work, let me know. Also, if any of you need to meet one-on-one with me this week, my time today and tomorrow is filling up quickly. Send me a request ASAP.

I think that’s it for now. See you on Tuesday afternoon, if not before. 🙂

-Alex

Tags: Update