Gary's Social Media Count

If you are a social media statistics junkie, this might be for you!

 

Introducing iSCORE

iSCORE is a web-based learning portfolio that has been tailored to meet the needs of music teachers and their students. Generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage, iSCORE is provided without charge to qualified users, and is a major step forward in the development of online teaching tools. iSCORE is the result of over a decade of research on the use of web-based tools to support learning. In developing iSCORE, musicians and students, aged 8 to 58, offered advice and helped field test the implementation of this tool in music studios and other community music making contexts. Studio teachers, all of whom prepare their students for RCM exams, also contributed to the design and testing of iSCORE. The tool supports music-making with a wide range of features. On the home page, students can create their own profiles and goals. Using the embedded recorder, students can record and save their music-making – repertoire they are studying or compositions they are creating. An annotation feature allows users to make comments directly on video or audio materials, and iSCORE also makes it easy to link to websites, upload documents, and create work directly in the portfolio. There are also links to composition and sequencing tools to encourage creative work. Interactive boxes allow for personalized plans, reflections, and feedback from teachers.

Royal Conservatory of Music iSCORE program

CBC digital music service launched

The CBC is diving into the world of online music with the goal of providing listeners access to their favourite tunes, and a way to discover new artists and connect with fellow music fans.

The free digital service CBC Music, which launches on Monday, offers access to 40 web radio stations, a vast array of music and blog posts by CBC personalities through a website and via mobile apps.

The new initiative allows the public broadcaster "to connect with listeners in something we’ve done well — music — but in new ways," said Chris Boyce, executive director of radio and audio for CBC English Services.

"Not only are we providing music, we’re helping people find the music and understand the music... there’s a ton of rich content that helps people understand the music as well as listen to it."

The CBC launch comes after private radio network Astral's recent unveiling of its own on-demand digital music service, which continues its roll out through the spring.

A segment of Canadians already listen to regular local radio stations via the web. However, at present, "it's actually a very small number [using] any kind of online music streaming service or internet radio service in Canada," according to Jeff Vidler, senior vice-president of research firm Vision Critical Communications.

"It's really underdeveloped in Canada, relative to other territories. If you look at the U.S. or Britain, it's much higher in terms of use of internet radio services or online music-streaming services," he told CBC News.

Read the article at CBC News

CBC Music - music.cbc.ca

Virtual Pop Star, the new Japanese holographic pop sensation.

She's pretty, stylish and oozes star quality. But Japan's latest pop sensation is not quite what she seems - in fact, she doesn't actually exist.

It turns out that Aimi Eguchi, the newest member of the Japanese band AKB48, is a virtual composite of six other band members.


The fake pop star first appeared in an advert for Japanese sweets, but also has an online profile and has featured in a magazine photoshoot using faked pictures. Her fans were shocked to discover this week that Eguchi's computer-generated features were created by blending the nose, hair, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and body shape of six real AKB48 members. Each was recorded using digital motion capture, allowing Eguchi's designers to select their best features for the composite pop star.

Clues to Eguchi's real nature were apparently there, if you knew where to look - her name is derived from the name of the sweet company and their product, along with the theme song from the advert. She's also not the country's first virtual pop star - Hatsune Miku, a synthesised singer, performs holographic concerts to hundreds of fans.

Eguchi is the latest example of advanced digital human techniques which, as we recently reported, are increasingly cropping up on our screens. While it is easy to notice that there is something not quite right about her once you know that she's a fake, she did manage to fool AKB48's fans for a number of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled - the next virtual star may be harder to spot.



Read the article at New Scientist

New learning tool on the horizon, teaching hand position through electronic stimulus

This one sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is not.

WANT to learn a musical instrument, but can't find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.

PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers. A belt worn around that part of the subject's arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements. Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. "The user's fingers are controlled without the user's mind," explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research.

Devices that stimulate people's fingers have been made before, but they used electrodes embedded in the skin, which are invasive, or glove-like devices that make it hard to manipulate an object. Tamaki claims that her device is far more comfortable. "The electric stimulations are similar to low-frequency massage stimulations that are commonly used," she says.

Having successfully hijacked a hand, the researchers tried to teach it how to play the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument. Koto players wear different picks on three fingers, but pluck the strings with all five fingertips, so each finger produces a distinctive sound. A koto score tells players which fingers should be moved and when, and from this Tamaki and her team were able to generate instructions telling their device how and when to stimulate the wearer's muscles.

PossessedHand does not generate enough force to pluck the koto strings, but it could help novice players by teaching them the correct finger movements. Tamaki and her team found that two beginner players made a total of four timing errors when using PossessedHand, compared with 13 when playing unassisted. After prompting from the device, the players also made one less mistake about which finger to use.

Read the article at New Sceintist
Hand-hacking lets you pluck strings like a musical pro - tech - 23 June 2011 - New Scientist

Does Addictive Internet use alter the Brain?

Kids spend an increasing fraction of their formative years online, and it is a habit they dutifully carry into adulthood. Under the right circumstances, however, a love affair with the Internet may spiral out of control and even become an addiction.

Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.

The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What's more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction.

"I'd be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn't change the brain," says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn't involved in the study. "The reason why Internet addiction isn't a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and sette on its diagnostic criteria," if it is a disorder at all, she says.*

Defining an addiction
Loosely defined, addiction is a disease of the brain that compels someone to obsess over, obtain and abuse something, despite unpleasant health or social effects. And "internet addiction" definitions run the gamut, but most researchers similarly describe it as excessive (even obsessive) Internet use that interferes with the rhythm of daily life.

Yet unlike addictions to substances such as narcotics or nicotine, behavioral addictions to the Internet, food, shopping and even sex are touchy among medical and brain researchers. Only gambling seems destined to make it into the next iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the internationally recognized bible of things that can go awry with the brain.

Nevertheless, Asian nations are not waiting around for a universal definition of Internet addiction disorder, or IAD.

Read the article at Scientifc American

Beware of online "Filter Bubbles"

"The internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, not necessarily what we need to see"

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Does the internet make us stupid?

This Book Review is a little off topic, but at the same time maybe should be a cue to make us think about how we use technology, and perhaps a reminder to us all not to over used it!

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr

‘I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off?

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word processing, don’t really add all that much to productivity; perhaps information becomes less valuable when it’s more widely available. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The other way computers could benefit us is more direct. They might make us smarter, or even happier. They promise to bring us such primary goods as pleasure, friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby transcending our biology and achieving immortality. It is all of this that Woody Allen is missing out on.

Read more »

The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments

Matt Locke originally came up with the concept of the Six Spaces of Social Media. Evan McIntosh added a seventh earlier this year, Data Spaces, and ideas about how education could harness these spaces, and the various transgressions between them, for learning.

This short presentation tackles the potential of adjusting our physical school environments to harness technology even better. What happens when we map technological spaces to physical ones?


The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.

tech tools for teachers

Thanks to Dan Roberts for putting together this great list of tools for classroom teaching. It seems we may still be in the infant stage of exploring how the net can serve as a giant communication tool, these sites below give us even more creative ways we can have our students interact and work with each other. Bring it on!

These tools are all free, easy to use, easy to access and can be used in any subject at any age to enhance the learning experience.

1. Wallwisher http://www.wallwisher.com/
Is a great little Web 2.0 tool principally for collaboration. You have a virtual wall where you can post little post it notes on to it although these are not like the normal yellow sticky notes you get as because they are online instead of just writing text you can add links to websites, images, music, audio podcasts and even videos. You can visit the example of the wallwisher one of my classes used here as a starter activity to a new topic: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/jameshutton

2. Photopeach http://www.photopeach.com/
Photopeach is basically a really easy, free to use tool to produce slide shows a bit like photostory apart from you can chose music from the library that is has so in some ways also like animoto but less fancy transitions. The best bit that I love about photopeach is the two added little extras that they have at the end. The first is that at the end of your show you can add a quiz section where you write questions and then the audience get to select multiple choice answers and see if they are right. I think that this is a great way to get students to test other students knowledge which could also be really useful for revision not only for the student creating the show who has to come up with suitable questions but also for the ones watching it making them think of the answers. The second is that at the end of watching you then have the option of leaving a comment like you can on most of the video/show type sites however this is different as when you leave a comment it stays on the video itself as if you were watching the credits. I think this has great potential for peer assessment and peer feedback and think it is just awesome. Here is an example of one students work. http://photopeach.com/album/blo8nv 

Read more »

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.

It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

Read the article:

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com

Changing face of education: Clickers in the Classroom

The way we conduct the processes of classroom education is changing. Technology is finding its way into classrooms in new and more interactive ways. Here is another example: from the New York Times:

If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

In Professor White’s 90-minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to “grab your clickers” to provide feedback

Read the article - New York Times, November 15, 2010

Do Podcasts Help Students Learn?

Before George Washington University renewed its iTunes U contract, the administration wanted to know how the podcasts impacted student learning and engagement.

In fall 2009, the university's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning studied a world history class of 262 students to find the answer.

But the answer isn't yes or no — the answer depends on the student's learning style, gender and motivation.

“If your goal is to find a magic bullet that makes all students better, this isn’t it," said Hugh Agnew, a professor from the Elliott School of International Affairs who taught the course. "But If your goal is to reach some students better that maybe you aren’t reaching so terribly well, then I think this is worth trying.”

6 interesting results

He created 10-minute podcasts with graphics and audio, as well as a text transcript of the podcasts with visuals to supplement his lecture class. In the first research run, half of the class used the podcasts, and the other half used the text. In the second run, they switched.

Overall, the study found no statistical difference between the performance of students who used the text and the ones who used the podcasts. But in subgroups, the podcasts did make a difference, said Yianna Vovides, director of instructional design at the center who conducted the research.

Three results that Vovides found interesting include the following:

1. Podcasts grab attention and maintain it.
2. Students conceptually understood the content, not just remembered it, and the scale of understanding seemed to tip toward the podcasts.
3. The students who said they weren't that motivated at the beginning of the class scored higher on the test when they listened to the podcasts.

And Agnew found these three results fascinating:

1. Guys improved their results from the pre-test to the post-test more with the podcasts. But the women's results showed no difference.
2. From the beginning of the research to the end, the number of students who preferred podcasts nearly tripled, jumping from 21 to 62.
3. In general, no one saw a dramatic uptick in results with the text or the podcasts. If they did the work, they did better on the test, he said.


Do Podcasts Help Students Learn?

Wi-Fi snooping tool drills gaping holes in security

This story is quite a bit off topic, but should of interest to anyone roaming around out there using laptops or other wireless devices at coffee shops, airports, or anywhere else where you are using an open wireless access point.

There is a new app out there that can turn any firefox browser into a hacking device.  So when you are using a wireless connection in a coffee shop, this is what the experts tell us to do:

Five tips to safeguard against Wi-Fi snoops

1. Don't use open Wi-Fi networks. If you must, when signing into Facebook, Twitter, your e-mail or other websites that require user authentication, make sure the Web address starts with https. Some sites, like your bank or gmail, automatically default to https. Others like Facebook and Twitter don't, but you can choose that option.
   
2. To switch to a secure connection, you can go to the address bar and add an "s" to http; for example, if you do that with Facebook, you'll find yourself at https://www.facebook.com. When you bookmark sites, make sure you bookmark the ones starting with https.
   
3. Use the Firefox plug-in Force-TLS to force sites to use https, a move that makes any data transferred between your computer and the website it is reaching unreadable to snoops. You can search for Force-TLS at https://addons.mozilla.org. There's a similar one on Firefox called HTTPS Everywhere, still in beta. Once Force-TLS is added, you'll get an option in the drop-down Tools menu to "ForceTLS Configuration." You have to add in all the networks you want to sign into only with https. If the website doesn't have the option of a secure connection, it won't work.
   
4. When you're signing into any networks that require authentication in a new wireless location -say you've gone out for coffee and taken your netbook along without signing out -make sure you have closed any online accounts before you log onto the network. Then sign in again, making sure it's over a https connection.
   
5. Use your company VPN (Virtual Private Network) or set up your own VPN, although that is an option more complicated than the casual computer user would want to undertake.

Wi-Fi snooping tool drills gaping holes in security    from the Vancouver Sun

Robert Dick’s Glissando Headjoint and Other Inventions

At this summer’s classical music concerts, you could of course find a healthy array of violins, trumpets and cellos. But amid the familiar strings and brass have sprouted some odd instruments and strange adaptations of standard ones.
Works by the quirky composer Harry Partch call for homemade percussion instruments that blend Asian and Western materials and designs.
Marc Ponthus attached a two-by-four to two pianos, allowing him to work both sustain pedals.
To create the required resonance for a Boulez sonata, for example, the pianist Marc Ponthus connected two grand pianos with a two-by-four, allowing him to work the sustain pedal of the second from his seat at the first.

Read more »

137 tech resources for teachers and students

Here is a link to another blog with some interesting links. There is a lot to explore in the new worlds of online education and here would be a good place to start  Some examples

Bartleby – Bartleby is a great reference site for teachers. The site’s published materials include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotation books, and well-known reference guides.

Moodle – This popular software package allows teachers to create free educational courses and websites. Moodle is a good place to teach an online course or create websites for students to study

TILT – TILT (Teachers Improving Learning with Technology) is a vidcast that broadcasts technology tips for teachers from other teachers.



137 tech resources for teachers and students.

If your Kids are Awake, They are Probably Online

So how much time do our kids have to practice and do homework? Considering that today is the day Apple is set to tell the world about the iPad, this article is rather timely. According to this study just released from the Kaiser Family Foundation in the United States by Victoria J. Rideout, M.A.,Ulla G. Foehr, Ph.D., and Donald F. Roberts, Ph.D., kids are spending almost every waking moment with some electronic media device or another.Smart phones, texting and Twitter are taking over our lives.. Knowing my own students, I would say that what is happening here in BC would be exactly the same, especially in urban areas.

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Article in the New York Times

Kaiser Family Foundation Study

Generation M2; Media in the lives of 8 - 18 year olds  Pdf report

Charities and Digital Giving

Tod Cohen in a recent artlicle points out that from recent studies in the US, it seems that many charities are behind the times when using digital means for fundraising and giving. For instance a new study conducted by Forrester’s Technographics for online provider Convio estimates online giving in the U.S. to nonprofits will total over $4 billion this holiday season, with over 111 million givers saying they plan to give over the Internet this year.  At the same time, a study earlier this year from Target Analytics, a Blackbaud company, found online giving generates only about one in 10 dollars given to charity.(from Stanford Social Innovation Review - Charities Missing out on Digital Giving )

Scot Hartley's follow up article provides some practical ideas for dealing with web 2.0 issues, and getting your organization engaged in the Brave New World of online fund-raising. There are a number of ways organizations of all sizes can leverage web tools to understand their users, target and acquire new followers, and solicit online donations:
Read more »

Open Source and Freeware music software

A fellow blogger, Joseph Pisano at MusTech.Net, has compiled and posted a list of Must-Have Downloadable Freebies for music teachers. It’s a great list, separated into the following categories: Audio Editing, Ear Training, Early Music Instruction (Kids’ Stuff), Jazz Related Programs, Looping/Audio Mixing, Lyrics/Song Writing, Metronomes, Notation, MIDI Sequencing, Music Theory, Tuners, and Virtual Pianos. I haven't had a chance to review all the programs, but there looks to be some useful things here.

British Library Sound Archives

The British Library has made 23,700 rare music and sound recordings from its massive collection, reputed to be one of the largest sound archives in the world, available for free online.

The Library announced that 2,000 hours of material — just a fraction of its entire catalogue of sound — are now available on its website.
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