Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

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.

This past year, Time Magazine named “You” (actually, all of us) as Person of the Year. This was done in part because of a recent paradigm shift in the Internet from being a vast, hyperlinked repository of information created by others, to the a second generation Internet (often referred to as Web 2.0)where all users can easily generate and post their own content and collaborate with others around the world.

Through new online technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites, as well as online audio and video sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Odeo, anyone can easily post and share rich content to the web. These new online collaborative tools offer great possibilities for enhancing music learning and teaching experiences.

Over the past two years when I was teaching middle school general music and now teaching at the college level, I have been experimenting a lot with online collaborative technologies like blogs, wikis, and podcasts.

I was initially drawn to wikis as a way to democratize my approach to teaching in my middle school music classroom. I saw wikis as a great way for my students and me to share our emerging understandings about composing and teaching music through composing. Our first project was the Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing. Here, I set up a free wiki at PBWiki.com and charged students in my first trimester classes with posting three tips to our encyclopedia. These tips could either be related to the use of the technology or tips about the composing process or musical self-expression. As the trimester continued (an in subsequent trimesters) students found themselves going to the Encyclopedia for tips when they got stuck. I also saw an increase in the amount of peer-teaching the students were doing in the classroom themselves.

A more recent project involved the use of wikis as a collaboration space among students in my middle school general music classes in Michigan and students in Steve Bizub’s middle school classes in Japan. Because of the time difference, our students never were able to talk or chat together in real-time. So, a wiki became the primary collaboration space for the project, augmented with video podcasts and email. One challenge, however, that emerged was related to the “homebrew” design of our collaboration space. Steve and I created a webpage that integrated a third-party blog, a PBWiki.com wiki, and video podcasts and iMixes through iTunes. Our students did comment that the site took a while to get used to and become fluent with. Had our project continued beyond the 6 weeks, the students may have made better use of the wiki.

Overall, online collaborative technologies such as blogs, wikis, and other online collaborative tools have the potential to extend both the physical and temporal bounds of our classrooms in meaningful ways. Many of our students are flocking to social networking sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com. These sites seamlessly integrate instant messaging, multimedia, blogs, and music in a very engaging package. How can we as music educators design and use online collaborative tools to support our students’ music learning? Through looking at how students use these tools in their own lives, valuable insights can be gained into their use within and beyond our own classrooms.