Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

Today, I came across a new Amazon.com service called UnSpun. UnSpun is a social list creation and sharing site with some unique possibilities for supporting learning in classrooms.

For a while now, I have been looking for a Web 2.0 tool that would enable my students, after reading a post or article on one of my course blogs, to be able to easily post their own questions and/or comments to be shared with the whole class. The architecture of blogs inherently supports readers adding comments to posts. However, when you have a lot of posts to read from a large number of students in a course, it takes a long time for the instructor to read and synthesize the themes and issues that emerge in students’ responses. As a teacher, I often base my class discussions on the topics raised by students in their blog post responses. Since I began facilitating my classes through blogs and social networks, I’ve wanted an easy tool where students could centrally post their questions and comments and vote the most important questions/comments (to them) higher and lower (similar to Digg.com). Amazon’s UnSpun now gives me that functionality.

Check out an embedded UnSpun list in this blog post:

Now, UnSpun looks to be quite nice for what I’d like it to do. However, as with many third-party social networking and Web 2.0 tools, there are pros and cons:

Pros: Readers can easily add their own questions and comments, these are placed in a central box which can easily be placed anywhere on a blog through the widget/embed code functions, readers can vote questions and comments they view to be more relevant to them higher on the list. Voting up or down an existing comment or question does not require signing in.

Cons: Readers have to have an Amazon.com account, they have to sign in to that account when adding a question.

Middle Ground: If you click to add another question or comment, you are taken to your list on Amazon’s UnSpun website. Once on this site, you can edit your questions, merge duplicates (a good function for the teacher), and add comments. It might get a little complicated and confusing if students decide to add comments on this page… there seems to be no indication on the embeddable widget that comments exist on the UnSpun website.

So, UnSpun looks to be a promising tool at least worth trying with my students this coming semester. If anyone knows of other Web 2.0 tools with similar functionality, please let me know.

Using Blogs to Facilitate College Courses - 2006-2007

ISU Music in Special Education
ISU Technology for Musicians
ISU Elementary General Music Methods

Using Social Networks to Facilitate College Courses - 2007-2008

ISU Secondary General Music Methods
ISU Technology for Musicians

Other Examples of Online Collaborative Tools in Music and Music Education

Wiki - Cranbrook Composers’ Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing
Online Collaborative Composing Communities - Funkdammen, dBass, Acid Planet & UNESCO Sounds of our Water.

Blogging Resources

Blogger
Wordpress

Social Network Resources

Ning
KickApps
Facebook

Online Multimedia Storage and Sharing Resources

Audio - Odeo
Video - YouTube
Video - Google Video
Multimedia Annotation - Mojiti

New Book

Music Education with Digital Technology - J. Finney & P. Burnard (Eds.). Continuum Press. ISBN: 0826494145. Ruthmann, A. Chapter 11: Strategies for supporting music learning through online collaborative technologies.

Back in the Fall of 2005 when I was first experimenting with Wikis in my middle school classroom, Eric Oatman, a news and features editor at the School Library Journal interviewed a number of teachers across the country (including me) about how we were using Wikis with our students.

The product of these interviews was an article on their website sharing a number of cool ways to integrate wikis into classes of all sorts. Though this article was written in 2005, it still provides a good overview of the possibilities of using wikis in your classroom. Since 2005, there have been many innovations in Wiki technology, most notably that many sites such as PBWiki.com and Wikispaces.com easily allow you and your students to create and manage wiki entries without having to know the special “markup” language many wiki interfaces required back in 2005. As with any technology, innovation continues and many become easier to use. Such has been the case with wikis over the past three years.

Back when I originally created the Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing for my middle school students, I browsed around and tested a number of free wiki sites and finally settled on PBWiki.com. I still use PBWiki today for my college classes because of its ease of use and multimedia features.

Since installing their new “point and click” interface back in January, users can now easily upload and post photos and streaming videos from YouTube, streaming audio from YackPack.com, add a chat room, install Google Gadgets, among other things.

As I have continued to experiment with wikis in music-related classes, the ability for students to create entries embedded with video and audio has become important. Though most wikis are optimized for textual and, to an extent, photographic-based collaboration, my students are moving toward conveying their ideas in audio and video form. Earlier this week Mojiti.com, previously featured on my blog here, released a new set of features that my students are already beginning to take advantage of.

The latest updates to Mojiti include:

• Multimedia annotations. Users can overlay/embed their own audio or video into a video.
• Freehand drawing support. Users can add their own Madden-style writing overlays.
• Mojiti-to-go Bookmarklet. This feature enables you to add a plug-in to your web browser which allows you to add Mojiti features to any streaming video hosted on the web.

Watch below or click here to see the new features in action.

I just received a fascinating email from Cambridge Journals, the publisher of one of the leading music education research journals, the British Journal of Music Education (BJME). BJME just published a research study conducted and written by a 12-year old student, Eleanor Denny. Working with researchers and other children at Open University, Eleanor designed, conducted, and wrote up a fascinating study about why students participate in musical experiences.

Here is her abstract:

I undertook this project as a 12-year-old student while studying research methods at the
Children’s Research Centre at the Open University. It has already been shown that doing
music improves children’s Mathematics and English scores. The aim of this study was to
find out if it also raises the aspirations of the children taking part. A questionnaire was
given out to 80 Year 7 children at two schools in Milton Keynes. Questions investigated
the children’s musical participation and future aspirations as well as their parents’ attitudes
and education.

The most important findings are that the musical participation of the children is
positively correlated with their future aspirations. Musical participation is most closely
linked with parental enthusiasm for it. Parental pressure and education were found to
have no link with musical participation, but families with low incomes may find affording
musical activities hard to maintain.

It is recommended that more money be put into music education so children of low
socio-economic backgrounds can have more of a chance to play musical instruments.

You can download and read the full research article here. Dr. John Finney from the University of Cambridge wrote a wonderful response to her article here.

Implications for music education

Why don’t we involve our students more in our research? Is the traditional “top-down” approach the best way to affect change in music education? I love John Finney’s idea that we should involve our students as “co-enquirers” in our research. All too often, we place ourselves as teachers and researchers in the role of “most knowledgeable” when, perhaps, our students should be seen in that role.

It is a great day in music education when one of the world’s leading music education research journals publishes a research study conducted and written by a 12-year old. Congratulations Eleanor!

Mojiti.com and Ning.com

Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:

• Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
• In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
• In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.

Click here to see Mojiti in action.

Ning.com (special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.