Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

The Young Professionals Focus Group (YPFG) of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) has just launched a new online social network - http://ismeypfg.ning.com/ where music educators from around the World can come together to share research, lessons, music, and educational strategies with each other.

This site was launched as part of a pilot project using the Ning social networking platform to bring together music educators in advance of the 2008 ISME World Conference this July in Bologna, Italy. Even if you can’t attend the conference in Italy, please stop by and join.

To start, we have a number of projects integrated into the website:

1. Research Mentoring - This group is for you to post questions and abstracts and to discuss anything related to your research or research in general. As the conference approaches, we will post the exact times and presentation schedule for our research sessions.
2. Social Lounge - Use this space to talk about anything and to get to know each other. Post your itineraries, places to stay in Bologna, and anything else you’d like.
3. Sharing Practice - This project will be formally launched in a month or so. We are looking to gather stories and examples of what music learning and teaching are like across the World from the perspective of ISME young professionals.

Stop by http://ismeypfg.ning.com/ to meet other music educators from around the World!

I’ve blogged before about using social networking technology to extend and support learning in music classes. When I was teaching middle school general music, I used a custom website with a third-party blog, multimedia player, and wiki. Since then, I’ve continued using social technologies with my college classes, and most recently with Ning.

Ning has been a great platform for setting up private social networks for my college classes. I use it as the online presence for all the classes I teach, rather than courseware tools like Moodle or Blackboard, because of its ease of use, clean design and integrated audio and video players and storage. What before took a lot of third party tools and time to code and program a website is simplified with Ning. My students and I log in to one site and set up our own personalized profiles to share, discuss, collaborate, and reflect on our compositions, teaching, or readings for class. Anecdotally, my students spend more time on class material responding to posts, sharing their music and providing feedback to each other on their peer teaching videos… most of it outside of class time.

I recently shared how I have been using these social networking technologies with faculty and students at Shenandoah Conservatory and at the University of Illinois. When speaking with music education majors and local teachers, many saw the potential of sites like Ning to support learning in K-12 schools, but rightly expressed reservations about the advertising and some of the design features of Ning. (Thanks to Steve Hargadon at http://education.ning.com/ for sharing that Ning now will eliminate the ads for K-12 Ning sites!!!) These concerns may now be set aside with a new private social network platform designed specifically for K-12 at http://www.imbee.com/.

Imbee has many of the same features of Ning, including blogs with integrated audio and video players/storage, but without advertising. Imbee also has intriguing and extensive parental and teacher controls. Each student account is connected to a “parent sponsor” who has ultimate administrative control over the content for his or her student or child. The design of the site is also kid friendly with bright colors and a clean layout. Take a spin over to Imbee.com and take their tour!

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.