Paradiddles and Paradigms

When I first started learning drumming, I was taught to play a paradiddle by breaking it down and playing it over and over and over and over. This was the procedure for most music learning at the time. Commit the piece to memory by playing it over and over and over, and over.

The only problem was that with such learning, we might "forget" the music and be so lost that we can only play the work by starting over from the beginning. Disaster.

I remember the breakthrough that occurred when a mentor helped me to "practice" away from the piano by conceptualizing the phrasing, the texture, and expressive destinations. I could actually "rehearse" the music in my mind, visualize my performance and hear within myself the music unfolding. Strategic elements of structure served to anchor this inner hearing and performance. This process involved me much more profoundly than playing passages over and over in almost robotic fashion.

In computer instruction, universities have been moving away from the practice of having people sit in front of computers to parrot steps through spoonfeeding. For one thing this practice slowed the pace of learning to the slowest learner and became a source of frustration for many in the class. For another, the focus was on small increments of a larger concept and the concept seldom emerged as the focus of learning. More importantly, such practice prevented the class from coming together as a community of learners, since the focus was shifted to each individual isolated in front of a computer screen.

Now there is more emphasis on the concept and the relationships of content. Applications have been designed with a certain aspect of game strategy where we can discover the next step of a procedure in several ways. There is always more than one path to completing most tasks in digital technology. We can probe menus intuitively, trying different applications, and we can also access tutorials that are clear and succinct, allowing students to move at their own pace.

Even "blogger.com" reflects this new paradigm. Notice that in setting up the account, you found your way through that process with sequential instructions that were simple and direct. Also notice that you could simply begin to blog. No special skills. Just fingers on the keyboard. Then hit "publish" and suddenly your authoring career has been launhed.

It wasn't until we needed to change the template that we had to bring our own previous html background into play. However, even if you did not have that background, blogger.com also contained a very clear tutorial on how to add links and how to change the template.

The goal is provide everything we need to accomplish a task, and to enhance and enlarge your capacity as you go along, thus enabling you to focus on the content and on the moment. The technology starts to recede as a transparent overlay. Try to imagine your creation of content as the focus of your learning. That is the new paradigm that continues to emerge as we engage this process.