Janine’s blog

[As posted to ict-learning email discussion list 30-Sep-07 http://lyris.education.tas.gov.au:8080/read/messages?id=39489]

I have just finished listening to a presentation titled  Can MOODLE become more SUPPLE? from the New Zealand Moodle Moot which finished yesterday (mentioned on Stephen Downes’ OLDaily e-newsletter).

The presentation discusses the need for traditional LMS/VLE systems (which are essentially Web 1.0 technologies) to move on and embrace Web 2.0 and thus morph into PLEs - Personalised Learning Environments. The presenter makes a case for Moodle being ahead of the game in this regard because of its open philosophy. Regardless of your views in the LMS wars, the discussion about learning design and how educational thinking needs to move on so that student use of web 2.0 is acknowledged and made use of, is great food for thought. The presentation is in Slideshare so you see the slides and hear the audio.

Moodlemoot website is at http://www.elearning.org.nz/ One of the most interesting slides in the presentation is one taken from another place. It shows a future possibility where educational organisations focus on providing the infrastructure and tools to collect learning evidence from whatever sources the student chooses to use.  See visual representation of this

Some postings on oz-teachers this week included recommended links to people keeping their finger on the pulse and thinking deeply about the use of Web 2.0 tools in education.

• Jane Hart maintains a directory at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and a personal blog
• Richard McManus’ Read/Write Web blog
  

and following on from their popular presentations on Web 2.0 at ACEC2006:

• Kathy Schrock’s Shedding Light on Web 2.0 site includes recent presentations.
• Ken Price’s Web 2.0 and education: best friends or worst enemies presentation

Alan Levine visited Hobart as part of his Australian speaking tour. I was lucky enough to join him for dinner with colleagues Jo and Frankie and Jo’s partner Nick. His workshop in Hobart was a sell-out and has received many glowing accolades. His presentation notes are available on the special blog he set up for his Australian tour - cogdogroo.wordpress.com. He cleverly fed this via RSS to his mainstream CogDogBlog site.

Follow the Australian tour.

and specifically…

Hobart workshop and specifically 50 ways to tell a Web 2.0 Story

Ok, I’ve followed the instructions (and re-read several times) for embedding a Frappr map on your own site ie here. However, all I can see is the toolbar below and not the map.

This link comes from Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. The introductory comment about which tool to use for the presentation being influenced by how the presenter’s brain now works, is interesting. It reminds me of working with some people in the past who needed to authorise content for the web but whose brains only worked in printed text mode. They simply could not see that a different style of writing was required. Maybe the brain adapts to whatever it is fed whether it be old new or emerging. I recall a summer in my teen years spent reading nineteenth century novels - Jane Austen etc. I found my natural conversation started to take on the style without any conscious thought at all.

Anyway, that meta-comment aside, this seems to be a good summary of the current state of play.

http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

The question: Are there any standards for referencing classical music, in the same way that there are standard referencing systems for print materials (Harvard, APA etc)?

Background: As part of my iTunes activity, I have uploaded all of my classical music collection. Early in the exercise, I noticed that there was a great lack of consistency in how the track information was formatted. I decided that as far as the composer field was concerned, I would like pristine consistency, so I settled on

<last name>comma<first names>space open bracket<year of birth>hyphen<year of death>close bracket

For example:

Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)    

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756 - 1791)

This convention then ensures that if I sort by composer, all of the Beethoven tracks will be together and I can easily gather them up (or a subset of them) in a playlist if I wish. I cannot automatically count them in iTunes but that is another story for another posting.

When it comes to the title field, the situation is far more complex:

For example, the well know piano piece “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven could be titled in any of the following ways

• Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27, No. 2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._14_(Beethoven)
• Sonata in C sharp minor, op. 27, nr. 2 “The Moonlight Sonata”  http://www.all-about-beethoven.com/moonsonata.html
• Piano Sonata no. 14, c sharp minor - Op. 27 no 2 http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/onestopbeethoven/a/moonlightsonata.htm

Why does it matter? So that you can do analytical things with the infomation. I have been experimenting with importing my iTunes information into an Excel spreadsheet for further manipulation. Unless the syntax of the title field has some predictability, it is not possible to query within it e.g. if I wanted to analyse my classical collection by symphony, concerto or other form. Perhaps the title field holds too much information and should be split up into subfields in order to auto-generate a syntactically correct reference? For this to be do-able, there needs to be an unambiguous way of referencing the pieces.

The plot really thickens when you also consider the orchestra, soloist, conductor etc. Presumably if a standard exists it will cover all of this.

Investigation:

FIRST: An advanced Google search revealed two potentially useful leads:

1. A reference to there being at least four standards. 
   

    http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/lion_elk/

   “Print lists of selected Music or Recordings in four ’standard’ formats - a MUST for insurance. “

   This refers to the fact that they list their stuff in a standard formatbut does not elaborate on what those formats ARE.

2.   RWC Music Database

http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/RWC-MDB/#intro The RWC Music Database is the world’s first large-scale music database compiled specifically for research purposes. Shared databases are common in other fields of academic research and have frequently made significant contributions to progress in those areas. The field of music information processing, however, has lacked a common database of musical pieces or a large-scale corpus of musical instrument sounds. 

This is interesting in its own right but does not exactly address my question. However, knowing that there is an academic area called “music information processing” will no doubt lead me to the experts in the field.

Second: Ask the local experts - ABC Classic FM
I sent a query through the ABC Classic FM website. I received a lovely reply from Graham Abbot who hosts Keys to music. Graham basically confirmed my findings to date by saying that there are no fixed standards. He also confirmed some conventions e.g. Mozart cataloguing interchangeably uses the K or KV nomenclature with a European preference for the KV reference. It appears that the whole field is somewhat ad hoc.

Next strategy - can anyone help? I am now putting the question to my colleagues through some online teacher email lists in search of musicologists while I work out how to access the “music information processing” experts. Meanwhile, any asisstance would be appreciated.

My daughter and her boyfriend are visiting from London at present and while in town purchased the latest Apple portable - the MacBook http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html -. It really is a beautiful thing and the integration is amazing. I think it is interesting to consider the form follows function aspect of the Apple phenomemon. Although it is true that you can often buy equivalent functionality and more in other brands, there is no denying that if you are a person who values the aesthetics of the things you own, the Apple devices are simply beautiful. Maybe it’s a girl thing…………..

There have been several writers over the years on the matter of (wo)man’s relationship with computers. My own recent (last 6 months or so) in depth experiences of iTunes and Picassa to organise my music and images have given me a new appreciation of this. Your computer becomes an extension of yourself, a constant companion - but with greater possibilities that the physical collections. Once it takes on this role in addition to being a workhorse, the aesthetics start to matter a whole lot more. In supplying Tasmanian teachers with laptops, the Department of Education has provided the opportunity for this personal as well as professional impact on all teachers. Well done DoE!  This should contribute to integrating ICT in learning and teaching - at a very minimum in getting out of the way and letting kids get on with it!

I am having a fantastic long holiday mostly at home and I indulged in some sale shopping the other day. One of my purchases was a book iPod therefore I am - $10 from Dymocks. I remember reading a review of it when it first came out. I suspect I could have written it!

So whilst some people might mock those who “overspend” on Apple devices, I would gently suggest they indulge in the pleasures of owning simply beautiful things once in a while and being willing to pay a bit more for it. Those who understand why women pay lots of $ for pieces of art (aka shoes and handbags) will understand!

Janine
(who loves iTunes and Picassa on her DoE supplied Windows machine, and who probably will buy an iPod just because…)
[posted to tas-it mailing list

While browsing through the Web 2.0 awards site, it struck me that simply browsing through the categories and reading some of the detail, would be a good way to introduce teachers to the concept of what web 2.0 is all about.  Most would recognise a few tools that they either use or have heard of. Seeing those tools grouped by category together with the ratings against the criteria  (useability, usefulness, social aspects, interface design, content quality) create a powerful impact. This does not get to the technical nitty-gritty of what qualifies a tool as a Web 2.0 tool but as a first introduction that does not really matter.

http://web2.0awards.org/

Web 2.0 at ACEC 2006

At ACEC 2006 recently there were a couple of presentations about Web 2.0 which provided some up to date thinking on where things are at from the point of view of considerations for an education system in adapting to such rapidly evolving technology developments.

Kathy Schrock gave a very practical introduction and overview that included key references and a list of current tools for consideration in an educational context. Refer to the conference abstract and paper  or  summary on her website

Another presentation by Ken Price focussed on key issues for education. In his usual thought provoking way and humourous way, Ken supplemented his paper with some interesting “this could happen to you too” examples. Refer to the conference abstract or read the paper.

Lots of people involved in providing services on behalf of education systems are pondering how best to respond to these developments in order to harness the possibilities in a safe and secure way for young learners.

Picture Australia and Flickr

An interesting example of an “older” online service that is tapping into the reality of uptake of Web 2.0 tools is the initiative of Picture Australia. Picture Australia aims to build a collection of Australian images. Recognising the popularity of Flickr, the online image sharing and management service, they have set up two tags on Flickr - “Australia Day” and “Australia: People, places and events”. They encourage people to use these flags when adding their images to Flickr. Picture Australia then uses these tags to add the images to their collection.

On the Flickr site, you can view all the Australia day images and all those tagged as  people, places and events

I am not sure yet of the mechanism for Picture Ausrtalia making use of this in their database (I am investigating this).

So, they continue with their core business of building a collection of Australian images but are leveraging off an activity that has great popularity with general users of the web. Food for thought….

Education case studies

This article illustrates one teacher’s experiences in this space (thanks Paul for this reference) http://www.techlearning.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200296 

An article by Miles Berry, dated January 2006 which describes how a primary class (year 6) is using Elgg (open source) effectively as a blogging tool. Interesting the he promotes the idea of developing simple html code from scratch in Notepad to develop understanding of what is behind web pages - I have seen that same “wow” factor with adults when they realise how simple the magic is! http://elgg.net/mberry/files/-1/3567/primary_blogging.pdf