Instructional Technology for Musicians

So I was thinking the other day in my free time about emerging instructional technologies in education and in libraries while listening to my iPod. The iPod I carry with me is basically the first one I've ever had because the one I have at home is strictly for my car and I didn't want to take on "my person". Anyway, I was thinking how cool it is to have this tiny computer on me that can carry so much music and other forms of media and fit in my back pocket. This is a long way from the big radio/cassette walkman that my mom got me when I was twelve.

It did make me think of other technologies that have changed or have emerged that has made learning music all together easier and more helpful. When I was growing up you just had basically you, you're instrument and a tape or record player to learn popular music. Of course if your family had more money you could afford lessons and such.

Afterwards, I thought what are the 5 coolest technologies that have evolved in recent years that would have made my practice sessions when I was thirteen in my bedroom my life a whole lot easier for about $30-$150 or free in one case.


Metronome: No guitar player or most musicians were required to have it unless you played piano because they were big and bulky capable to sit on top of the piano. They were also very expensive. Portable metronomes can now provide you with instant time and leave you not guessing what intermezzo, fortissimo, blah blah blah is. Just turn it to 240 beats per minute (bpm) and rip the Slayer out of your loins or dial it down to 50 to get your Leonard Cohen on.


Electronic Tuner: You know what my first tuner was? A frickin' tuning fork. If you don't know what a tuning fork is, it's a metallic device that you strike on something (like your knee). Then the vibration from the fork gives you a perfect A note which you would tune your guitar to. Oy vey.
Now we have electronic tuners that allow you to tune to any note that you want. Stage tuners, or tuners that you can use when you play live and have a bypass button, would allow guitarists and bass players to tune quietly, instead of punishing the audience.


Drum Machine: After you played air guitar and practice for hours your favorite songs with out other musicians you would wonder how your songs would sound with some drums. Alas, affordable and decent sounding drum machines allowed you to construct your own drum parts and play along. Oh and you don't need sticks to play these, just your fingers.

Phrase Trainer: Ok, remember when I lamented learning songs on a boom box? Well guitarists now a days can buy a phrase trainer. Basically, you can record any musical part from a CD or DVD into the phrase trainer and it will repeat over and over again until you get it right. It can also slow the recorded phrase down so you can learn it slowly and train your ear to the right pitch.


YouTube: Yup you gotta it: information sharing and Web 2.0 is for musicians too. In the past classic music instruction required you to learn musical notation that later turned into tablature (a simplified version of notation that just tells you that exact location of notes according to instrument). Later you were able to use VHS tapes for lessons and later led to DVD instruction. These were all great but they cost $$ and once you were done with them they would sit collecting dust on your shelf or in your closet.

Musicians are now using you tube to share how they have learned the music they love and how to play it. Also, people get to comment on each other's playing and thus becomes interactive with an audience they would not have just practicing in their bedrooms without any kind of feed back.

Here's a young kid playing tool:


There's a lot more out there but this is just a simple list.

r.

Every Child CAN Learn

The two articles's for this week's class (Leard & Lashua, 2006 and Cavallo et. al) describe at length teachers and researchers success stories with young people who through pedagogical practices ascribed by Freire were able to accomplish what many thought was not possible. "The City That We Want" presented a wonderful paradigm for teaching by combining the epistemological theories of Piaget, Freire and Papert and providing a "generative theme whereby any participant will have their own ideas and beliefs and can use these to guide their conception and implementation." Thus, the student can use the skills and ideas that they have experienced to guide them in learning and most importantly changing the world around them for the better.

As it pertains Instructional Technologies class and how technologies are used I felt the Cavallo article illustrated some poignant moments of the use of cameras by students to illustrate and narrate their environments. One example, the young girls who used cameras to show the deplorable conditions and sexual the harassment. These girls understood how to portray their environment and displayed what needed to be changed to fight against the conditions they faced.

I couldn't help to think that the subtexts to these examples are to disprove many of the prejudices that people have about children in inner city or "developing nations": an idea that only certain children want to learn and others do not or are not interested in it. Many believe that some young people have given up or are lazy. Some believe in bogus theories of intelligence that it is a product of genes. Through critical pedagogy and understanding the problems of life under capitalism and what it creates (inequality, racism, sexism, etc), educators of all types need to understand that children not only want to learn but need it as they do breathing. Would we ever ask a child, do you want to breathe?

The real question within these pedagogical breakthroughs, where teachers were able (with support of course) to reach students with all the environmental baggage they carry, is whether societies in general are making the reforms or revolutions to move into a system of education that can work. Education here meaning much more than what is "required" by some standards but a deeper understanding of how to change your surroundings. I think Leard & Lashua in quoting Dimtriadis made the conclusion that, "it is important to validate a wide range of competencies in the classroom, such as emceeing or rapping, and utilize knowledge gained from efforts to survive on the streets."

By understanding the literacy of young people, or our students, we can develop along with relevant technologies a curriculum that is relevant to our students needs. A problem-solving education should not be something foreign to our understanding of how children learn or how knowledge is gained. Instead it should be our daily practice of solving the problems of society in general because in the end if you cannot eat, how relevant is knowing Plato, Socrates or the rest of dead philosophers?

Instructional Technology: Themes past, present and future

The other day I considered, while reading Paul Gee's text, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, what will be the view of the world of young people in the future? I am sure that question is an old one because it must've been considered by every generation of young people who had to translate their surroundings and make-do with what their historical context gave them. Record turntables turned into musical instruments. Media in its multiple forms bombards us all and develops our consciousness with images, words, screens, sounds, bytes, and pixels in completely different ways than humans ever experienced. How will technologies be turned on their head to subvert the oppressors?

Instructional technologies can be any technology that can be used to descipher, translate or change the world. Wires intersecting metal, die-cast or plastic compartment; connecting machines, connecting humans. The question remains who is the technology or what is the technology being used for. If we are to use say blogs, in a Freire conceptualization of education for "freedom," to communicate to each other our feelings and knowledge of the world, can we use these to unify our experiences of the universe so that we don't feel so alone? In the 19th century Marx said that religion was the opiate and sigh of the masses, maybe web 2.0 is that drug.

Obviously some objects are considered specifically "technology." Computers, servers, iPods, laptops, etc. for the general population is fetishized as technology, ignoring the many objects around us were technology in the past: tv or radio for instance. Consider that even our thumbs were an evolutionary technological advance that differentiated us from other animals.

12 years ago I used to be skeptical about the use of technology like email to communicate with friends and family. I don't think I even considered back then the use of a cell phone. Now I can't even consider what would life be without these items. They've become appendages to our existence. For good or bad?

For one I don't think I'm using these technologies to exploit or oppress anyone but rather communicate in a new form that may be more immediate than past technologies. Dime in public telephone. In other words haven't our present consciousness been shaped by these technologies we've adapted to our lifestyle?

I think we can use these to our advantage to engage each other in a praxis that doesn't involve the ruling elite who would want to use these to make a profit and further suppress our ideas and more importantly our actions. We can use these to teach our understand the consciousness of the oppressed.

A new theme? No it's the history of society in conflict. Shattered by bullets and time cards implemented by humans not by technology.