Musicators

Sometimes the distinctions between musicing and musicating become blurred. Musicing is making music and music making, while musicating is learning and teaching music. Ideally the teaching and learning cycle is achieved through making music, and technology enhances that process, making musication an act of creating and through the creating, learning takes place. In other we learn when we create, and creating is a way of making meaning in our lives.

Digital technology provides a means to establishing musicing as learning and teaching. This is a simultaneous process and the dichotomy between teaching and learning, teachers and learners dissolves into creative energy and interchange.

Watching this process emerge as musicers gain power iover the technology is fascinating. Creative music technology has a way of dissolving polarities, dissolving products and objects into process.

Tech Learning Curves

Sometimes our initial encounter with a new technology makes us feel very much like the bewildered fellow in this video on introducing the technology of the book.

No matter what application we may be learning, there is always some sort of learning curve. Of course the ideal is that as we work we learn and assimilate concepts that empower us with greater understanding with every encounter.

Actually many applications have taken advantage of what we have learned from video games. Video games have very sophisticated end goals that require achieving a number of successive levels as one discovers clues and solves problems that provide access to higher realms of activity and awareness. Yet, most games assume that players know nothing and must learn as they play the game.

Thus the games are created to help reinforce intuitive choices as well as encourage random probing as an approach to discovery of the various options available. Usually there is more than one way to succeed. This is a strategy that would serve us well in educational settings.

Another key element in video games is spontaneity, which keeps our interest and renews our commitment. The more we anticipate that we are on the edge of discovery and renewal, the more we press on. Spontaneity suggests that there are immediate outcomes to our actions and responses. Feedback is instantaneous even if somewhat cryptic at times. Digital technology is geared to create immediate feedback. We write html code or create an animation and immediately open it. The technology provides a feedback loop that engages our own critical faculties. We don't like particular colors or fonts. we want different images. The image should be smaller. The timings need to be adjusted, and so forth.

Thus technology can afford an opportunity for developing critical thinking and inquiry through immediate and personal reflection on the results of our efforts.

New Challenges in Collaboration

As performing arts educators, many of us are starting to explore collaboration as creative process. This is a technique that emerges from the spirit of Web 2.0, which places each person at the center of creative activity, unmediated by authority except the discipline that emerges from responsibility and an expanding base of knowledge.

Technology can play a role in this collaboration, but it does not substitute for genuine interactive exchange. Collaboration sets in motion a dialectic process that creates new materials from the colliding polarities of different ideas, a synthesis that forges exploration of new artistic terrain. We are at the beginning of this dialectic exchange. How does technology play a role in this process? Does technology confuse the issue and mislead the participants? How can we be sure of the sources we find through the technology of the Internet?

Web 2.0 is a scary proposition for teachers, writers, and critics who are used to controlling the flow of information and mediating correctness. One such doomsday prophet is Andrew Keen in his recent book The Cult of the Amateur. As long as we have mediators such as Mr. Keen, keen on saving us from ourselves, we have nothing to worry about.