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Martin Burrett

Pareto Knew How To Balance It All by @ArtyTeach79 - 18 views

ukedchat.com/...-balance-it-all-by-artyteach79

article 20% time balance

shared by Martin Burrett on 14 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 14 Aug 16
     
    "In an ever demanding world the need to balance school and home life has never been greater. Recently I explored and shared with staff the 80/20 principle."
Glenn Hervieux

The phrase "CIPA complaint content" can be misleading - Balanced Filtering in Schools - 2 views

balancedfiltering.org/-complaint-content-can-be-misl

digitalcitizenship cipa filtering

shared by Glenn Hervieux on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Glenn Hervieux on 06 Aug 11
     
    Great article that I think will help clarify for school admin., tech coordinators, teachers, students, etc. what our responsibilities and roles are in digital citizenship with regard to appropriate content. BalancedFiltering.org is a grassroots campaign to promote balanced content filtering in schools which complies with the law, promotes accountability, and encourages responsible digital citizenship.
Tricia Rodriguez

Education Week: Publishers Turn to Cloud Computing to Offer Digital Content - 47 views

www.edweek.org/...01cloud.h05.html

education

shared by Tricia Rodriguez on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • struggling to strike a balance between print and digital curricula for students, textbook publishers are taking to the cloud to house new digital resources and curricula.
    • Tricia Rodriguez
      Tricia Rodriguez on 12 Nov 11
       
      Just as with "hybrid education" schools must find a way to balance the types of resources we are providing our students. Funding is key here as well as the consideration of sustainability. 
  • cloud computing
  • dip their toes into
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • lack of resources
  • nformation and power available from servers hosted by a separate, off-site entity
  • bandwidth and hardware support,
  • cloud-based textbook is stored on the Internet by servers not operated by school districts themselves
  • Web 2.0 forma
  • start discussions with each other about the content, complete interactive assessments and activities, and search Google or Wikipedia for further information.
    • Tricia Rodriguez
      Tricia Rodriguez on 12 Nov 11
       
      Students are able to interact with the content and not act as passive consumers. This is key as the classroom struggles to catch up with the true status of society.
  • [Cinch]
    • Tricia Rodriguez
      Tricia Rodriguez on 12 Nov 11
       
      In actuality, this publishers has provided a CMS embedded with their curriculum. This is probably where text-book providers will need to move to in order to stay competitive. 
  • upgraded its online bandwidth
Peter Beens

Teacher Magazine: Stepping Aside: The Art of Working With Student-Teachers - 1 views

www.teachermagazine.org/...tln_norton_student_teach.html

education student teacher

shared by Peter Beens on 14 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Peter Beens on 14 Sep 09
     
    Stepping Aside: The Art of Working With Student-Teachers\n\nTeacher Leaders Network Although traditional teacher-education programs rely on veteran educators to invite student- or "practice-" teachers into their classrooms, many skilled professionals can be heard expressing some reluctance about sharing instructional responsibilities with green recruits. They may be concerned about their ability to mentor an inexperienced colleague effectively, or simply hesitant to relinquish control of instruction in an atmosphere of high-stakes accountability.\n\nIn a recent post to the Teacher Leaders Network Forum daily discussion group, veteran teacher Vicky expressed some reservations of her own about working with a student-teacher and asked for help.\n\nI may be getting the opportunity to work with a student-teacher. I was wondering about your ideas for starting the year off right, helping the student-teacher, and balancing the load of mentoring the student teacher and teaching the students myself. I'm excited about the possibility, but I'm also a pretty hands-on control freak kind of person, so I want to alternately challenge and excite the intern but not be unfair or scary. Tips?\n\nNancy, a veteran K-12 music teacher, replied:\n\nGreat questions, Vicky. My first suggestion would be adopting the perspective that you will learn as much as the novice teacher-about yourself, your beliefs, and your practice. The first step is probably building a relationship in which the novice teacher trusts you enough to share real information and opinion (and vice-versa).\n\nCreate a safe space to communicate honestly, in both directions. A student teacher who feels comfortable enough to share fears, anxieties, confusion, and frustration-and knows that he or she is not being judged, but honored as a learner by a veteran teacher who also has fears and frustrations-will be a student teacher who can grow.\n\nMy second thought is that from your students' perspective there should be two experts
anonymous

The Art of Virtual Leadership - 4 Keys to Leading Remote Workers and Managing Virtual T... - 19 views

www.evancarmichael.com/...nd-Managing-Virtual-Teams.html

leadership leading remote workers managing teams

shared by anonymous on 18 May 13 - No Cached
  • Many organizations believe that one of the biggest challenges they face when implementing a virtual office is managing mobile or remote workers. It is unfortunate that they let this perception stop them from reaping the many benefits of a more flexible workplace.
  • Remote management is not radically different from managing people on-site. The biggest difference is a shift in management style from "eyeball management" (assuming workers are being productive because you physically see them at their desks working) to managing by results. By learning to mange by results rather than activity, improving communication, and nurturing trust between managers and employees the whole organization benefits. In fact, virtual team managers have reported that their overall management skills increased for both on and off-site workers.
  • MANAGING BY RESULTS, NOT ACTIVITY One of the most common fears that managers and executives have when considering virtual teams is, "How do I know my employees will be working if I'm not there to watch them?" Well the simple answer is that you won't, not every minute. But realistically, you can't be sure they are really working every minute you see them in the office either; it is easy to confuse activity with productivity. A manager's job is to provide specific, measurable, and attainable goals for the remote employee so that he or she knows what must be done and when. These can include reports completed, number of calls made, and number of support issues resolved - or any other appropriate measure of job productivity.It is important that the employee and manager arrive upon a shared definition of the deliverables and timetable together. This ensures that everyone is on the "same page" and prevents miscommunication. It also ensures that the goals and expectations are realistic. A manager's value to an organization is as more of a coach and mentor, not an overseer. This move away from "eyeball management," and the resulting clearer definition of employee job responsibilities, is one of the major contributing factors to the improved productivity normally experienced with virtual teams. Shifting your focus to performance based management will help you build a more productive mobile workforce.
  • anonymous on 18 May 13
     
    Manage by results
anonymous

University Presses Are Urged to Work Together to Survive - Publishing - The Chronicle o... - 7 views

chronicle.com/...126633

shared by anonymous on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Jul 11
       
      I'm struck by the fact that this article is quick to warn that social networking voting models are likely to be "gamed" by interested parties. The report itself notes that "monographs remain largely static objects ... instead of being vibrant hubs for discussion and engagement" (3). If this is going to be a success as we move forward, I think a balance will need to be found between those two poles.
Adrienne Michetti

Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views

jcmc.indiana.edu/...steinkuehler.html

games gaming social

shared by Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09 - Cached
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      This is, I think, why I'm more keen on today's social networks than I am on games -- games do not provide deep emotional support.
  • "bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      Putnam - need to check this article. Interesting; not sure I agree.
  • ...80 more annotations...
  • According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
  • The evidence to date is mixed
  • A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      SO True
  • It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
  • combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
  • By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
  • loosely structured by open-ended narratives
  • They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
  • from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
  • the conclusions of both studies were remarkably aligned.
  • the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      Love this quote.
  • demonstrate the "effects" of game play vs. no game play.
  • first project was a traditional effects study
  • second project, a qualitative study of cognition and learning in MMOs (
  • ethnography
  • sociocultural perspective
  • as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
  • a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      but I wonder why he chose these games -- this is not specified. Only their success in US and abroad?
  • brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
  • the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals.
  • In what ways might MMOs function as new third places for informal sociability?
  • virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
  • in this section we analyze the structural form of MMOs that warrants this "third place" assertion.
  • eight defining characteristics of third places
  • there is no default obligation
  • To oblige any one person to play requires that explicit agreements be entered into by parties
  • the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
  • Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
    • Adrienne Michetti
      Adrienne Michetti on 19 Nov 09
       
      and this is why, in my opinion, you will never see games in school. The game cannot be the Third Place because school is a Second Place.
  • Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
  • the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
  • an individual's rank and status in the home, workplace, or society are of no importance
  • appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
  • conversation plays an analogous role
  • "In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
  • third places must also be easy to access
  • such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
  • accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
  • barriers to initial access.
  • "What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
  • "It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
  • affective sense
  • As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
  • engendering a sense of reliable mentorship and community stability.
  • Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
  • In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
  • Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
  • Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
  • The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
  • the home-like quality of third places in rooting people
  • Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
  • create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
  • Are virtual communities really communities, or is physical proximity necessary?
  • Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
  • Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
  • operates cyclically within social networks because of their associated norms of reciprocity
  • bridging social capital is inclusive.
  • This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
  • On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
  • bonding social capital is exclusive.
  • social superglue.
  • it can also result in insularity.
  • shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
  • Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
  • One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
  • While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
  • Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
  • It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
  • It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
  • In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
  • However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
  • Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
  • Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
  • Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
  • is to what extent such environments shift the existing balance between bridging and bonding
  • In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
  • Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
  • it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
Brianna Crowley

Education Week: Interpretations Differ on Common Core's Nonfiction Rule - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...19nonfiction_ep.h32.html

Common_Core literature standards english_classroom curriculum

shared by Brianna Crowley on 31 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Ideally, she said, teachers are working in cross-disciplinary teams to decide how to balance those shared responsibilities in a solid curriculum.
  • And Ms. Highfill has not found the guidance on shared, cross-curricular responsibility to be translating into classroom reality. In her district, she said, "there still seems to be more of a focus on English teachers' using nonfiction in classrooms than the other content areas stepping up to the plate."
  • such titles are meant for classes other than English, and seeing them as texts that displace works like The Catcher in the Rye takes titles out of context and ignores the messages of the standards document as a whole.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • teachers and local administrators are the ones who must decide how to share responsibility for the increased emphasis on nonfiction. "If a lot of good, close reading of high-quality, challenging texts is going on in science and history classes," she said, "then English/language arts teachers need to carry less of that responsibility."
  • It is English/language arts teachers who will be held accountable for the results, which will drive what happens in their classrooms week to week, he said.
Rose Whittingham

ScienceDirect.com - Teaching and Teacher Education - In search of the essence of a good... - 51 views

www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/...S0742051X03001185

shared by Rose Whittingham on 23 Feb 13 - No Cached
    • Rose Whittingham
      Rose Whittingham on 23 Feb 13
       
      And this is what I have the most issues with. I have an active disdain for the "transfer of knowledge" model and want to inspire staff and students to focus on the SKILLS, which I believe are the indicators of lifelong learning and a valuable education experience.
  • self-concepts are extremely resistant to change, even in the light of facts that clearly contradict them (Swann, 1992).
  • Stated more positively, with more balance between the various levels, the teacher will experience less inner and outer frictions. Ideally, there is a complete “alignment” of the levels, which means that the teacher's behavior, competencies, beliefs, identity and mission together form one coherent whole matching the environment.
Ed Webb

Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid? - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 59 views

chronicle.com/...66128

technology education carr attention

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jul 10 - Cached
  • what the evidence suggests is that, unless it's very carefully planned with an eye to how the brain processes information, multimedia actually impedes learning rather than enhances it
  • a very balanced approach. Educators need to familiarize themselves with the research and see that in fact one of the most debilitating things you can do to students is distract them.
  • the risk of using search for online research is that everybody gets led in the same directions to a smaller number of citations which, as they become ever more popular, become the destination for more and more searches. And ... he suggested that simply the act of flipping through paper copies of journals actually may expose researchers to a wider array of evidence.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • l it a questionable classroom
Ed Webb

How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds - WSJ.com - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...SB124079001063757515.html

bestpractices review cognition styles learning education

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jul 09 - Cached
  • what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy
  • it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time
  • Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • students cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material
  • Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid.
  • what is being taught in most of the curriculum -- at all levels of schooling -- is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form
  • At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Jul 09
       
      But if you learn dancing AND algebra, you may be better at both, or at least approach each in a more interesting way.
Mary Beth Messner

Creating a Sense of Time in Online Courses | Faculty Focus - 62 views

www.facultyfocus.com/...ense-of-time-in-online-courses

Teaching Tips TeachingOnline Content Time Elearning Updating Discussions

shared by Mary Beth Messner on 25 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • While we all agree that the five-year-old unnarrated PowerPoint is a dangerous and ineffective piece of content in an online course, we would also all agree that we can’t redo each narrated piece of content each semester. How do we strike a balance between creating content that is fresh (more on that in a moment) and being able to reuse content that is valuable?
    • Amy Cohen
      Amy Cohen on 25 Apr 11
       
      Addressing issues in reusing online course content
  • For teachers it makes them participate in the content, revisit the content they created in the past, and make it delivered in a “present” time for the students. For students it tells them that the teacher “was just here,” and that this stuff is happening now. It makes the content seem more relevant, and helps build a sense of community in the course.
  • By creating content that has elements of real time associated with it, instructors can generate a sense of presence and freshness that are often missing in online courses.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Lastly, keep the flowers fresh.
  • A sense of time is created in discussion boards because they have only that week to complete the work and there is an understanding that the conversations happen in time. But often asynchronous discussions have wide gaps of time between student interactions. One way to bring time closer to the students is to allow them to subscribe to forum threads they are involved in. You can do this in most LMS solutions. Students get an email alerting them to activity in the thread they are active in and it brings them closer “in real time” to the events happening in the class. While this can be overwhelming in larger courses, in a class of 20 or 30 students it usually does not amount to an unreasonable amount of email notifications. One of the most effective ways to bring timeliness to an online course is do a quick recap of previous week, as well as provide a preview of what is expected for the current week. Using screen capture software to go through the course and set expectations is a great way to not only share a bit of yourself with students, but it is a pre-emptive way to answer questions students commonly ask.
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views

chronicle.com/...126451

shared by D. S. Koelling on 28 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
  • What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
  • students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
  • It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
  • As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
  • Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
  • Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
  • It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
  • Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
  • Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
  • Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
  • Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
  • Steve Ransom on 28 Feb 11
     
    So many issues here to deal with. Good read.
Wendy Arch

ollie-afe-2019: Educational Leadership: The Quest for Quality--article - 2 views

moodlesw.aealearningonline.org/...view.php

shared by Wendy Arch on 26 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • t also helps them assign the appropriate balance of points in relation to the importance of each target as well as the number of items for each assessed target.
    • Wendy Arch
      Wendy Arch on 26 Mar 19
       
      At first when looking at this test plan, I questioned how an English teacher who gives very few "tests" in favor of application essays would create a test plan. However, then I realized that each of the learning targets is really just a criterion on a rubric. Instead of having a certain number of questions, each category is worth a different weight. That makes the test plan idea make much more sense in my mind.
  • minimizing any bias that might distort estimates of student learning.
  • Will the users of the results understand them and see the connection to learning?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • From a formative point of view, decision makers at the classroom assessment level need evidence of where students are on the learning continuum toward each standard
meghankelly492

Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views

muse.jhu.edu/224140

world Music

shared by meghankelly492 on 22 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
  • "Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
  • The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
  • Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
  • Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
  • raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
  • It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
  • n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
  • I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
  • This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
  • Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
  • I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
  • When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
  • Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
  • ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
  • as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
  • In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
  • n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
  • Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
  • Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
  • I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
  • Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
  • Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
  • In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
  • If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
  • After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
  • n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
  • In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
  • Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
  • After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
  • Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
  • Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
  • Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
  • Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
  • n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
  • While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
  • By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
  • which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
  • . On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
  • Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
  • Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
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