MOODLE & EVOCA: Wiki Community Builders

Moodle is a wiki for building a community of teachers/learners. It is an open source alternative for Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Blackboard. Content will be created by the community of users and their involvement with the subject can extend beyond the traditional boundaries of course dates. Although it is relatively new, Moodle is already widely used internationally in a number of languages.

For my purposes, I am exploring Moodle as a a platform for WebMusicing or EMusic. As the idea evolves as to how we can extend our musical growth and experience through connecting with likeminded individuals and musicing on the web, I am trying out different strategies and premises for building community. Moodle may be a step in the right direction. I came upon the idea through a news source on the Musicing News and Views newsblog.

And somehow, my search for Moodle brought me to a intriguing site, Evoca, a community of individuals connected by sound. This site approaches creating soundscapes and soundbytes like bloggers approach creation of text-based sites. You might call it Audacity on Line, except that you can't yet edit sound files---but if you have a mic, you can record on the spot from anywhere on the Internet.

Evoca is emerging as an audio sharing community, an audio version of Flickr that is in its infancy, but representative of a new generation of applications for users who are interested in sharing work with each other. You can get a sense of this new perspective since often new versions of software provide a new option for saving or publishing called "share."

Specialized Newsblogs

The Internet has changed the nature of news. News is no longer what a group of editors at the newspaper or radio/television editors decide to report in their time/space for an ever-shrinking audience (they are all going to the 'Net).

News is happening all the time to all of us and it is altering our fields from moment to moment, since news is essentially the emergence of new information, events, techniques, concepts, and ideas. The main forum for this news is the WWW, but we can't possibly keep visiting all the websites we need to every hour or so. RSS aggregators scan the Internet according to our specifications and harvest the latest postings (most update every few hours).

Managing a newsblog for the web is not something you can set once and then forget it. It requires a degree of monitoring and tweaking as new sources for feeds are discovered and added, as keywords are refined to sharpen the focus, and other criteria are developed for how the information should be displayed.

If you have visited Musicing News and Views recently, you will notice it has changed considerably in the past few days. It still looks the same, but the content has changed drastically. There have been new sources added, and the newsblog searches for the most recent entries on the sources and reports them in the order of newest to oldest. For sources that are blogging as a source for the feeds, they may find they are not included if their blog entries have been few and far between. I find I am discovering new ideas as I visit the newsblog. As far as I know Musicing News and Views is the first newsblog of its kind, and several of my colleagues have created newsblogs to reflect their interests and/or needs.

Musicing is expanded to mean making music and music making and all the attendant factors that are a part of this human activity of creating, playing, listening, studying, teaching, learning, theraping, and technologizing that make up the lives of people musicing today. These activities all meld into process in which distinctions overlap and actions complement and stimulate one another.

Podcasts, Screencasts, and Wikis

Three "new" technologies seem to be capturing the imagination of the Web 2.0 generation:

1. Podcasts (audio and video files made available through RSS on a subscription basis),
2. Screencasts (usually tutorials and short "documentaries" which is taking screenshot of demos of software while the steps are being narrated), and
3. Wikis (a database that is expandable and editable by all participants).

Podcasts simply make use of digital audio and/or video software to generate a file. The usual techniques of editing apply. These range from highly scripted presentations such as the Bill Edddins series on Classical Connections Lives!!!!!, or collections of files for playing, such as a collection of jazz like The City at Night. Video adds a layer of production to the audio, including moving and still images as you can see in this promo on learning the guitar.

Screencasts use screen capture technology to demo new software such as the this short 90 second tutorial on how to use Linky, or mixing video and screen capture such as Jon Udell's account of a flood in Vermont.

Wiki may best be known for the Wikipedia. The public has been creating this on-line encyclopedia for years. It has become one of the largest shared creative projects on the Internet. Wiki coms from the Haiwian word wiki wiki which is used to describe something as quick or fast. This collaborative approach to creating knowledge has tremendous implications for the arts, but it is time that we understand art as not only expression but as a form of knowledge. Maybe then we can enter into collaborative creations with a sense of adventure and discovery.

These three technologies have helped to reshape the new age of digital technology, making the acronym CAI more and more obsolete in terms of teaching and learning, perhaps taking on a new meaning for CAI: Can't Attract Interest.

Stephen Downes Stepping Down

Stephen Downes has decided to withdraw from the scene for a time. This announcement is much like hearing that the Rock of Gibralter has crumbled and slipped away into the ocean. It is especially traumatic for those of us who discovered him and his ideas only recently. I discovered him through a blog in Singapore, and I found that my thoughts on music education technology are in sync with his principles and advocacy. What will we do without Ol'Daily? Downes kept us alert, informed, and aware. I guess now we have to do it for ourselves.

Here is Stephen's announcement on his website:

I have always tried to offer as much of myself as I could through this service and others in my work and in my own time. It has never been enough, which was made clear to me today, but I am tired and don't have anything more to give.

Accordingly, I am placing this newsletter and website on hiatus for an indefinite period. I will be back when I'm back.

Please know that I have always valued and held in the highest esteem the work that all of you are doing to try to make things better, especially for the young. My dedication toward your objectives, toward social justice and opportunity, toward a better life for all, is never wavering, will never waver.

It is time for a darkening of the light as I retreat and think about what I am going to do and how I am going to do it, but know that the light will never flicker and never fade. I wish you well in your endeavours, and I will be back to walk the long hard road alongside you.

This King is dead. Long live the King!

A Break in the Action

The Web never sleeps, but universities are fond of taking breaks as though there is some need for refuge in the midst of so much rigor and ardor!

Thus we went on spring break during the last gasps of winter and returned on the first day of spring, which was still wearing its disguise of winter.

Our final days before the break focused on Actionscript for Flash, a useful code or language that can add a layer of functionality to the Flash presentations that go beyond the traditional drag and drop orientation of object manipulation.

Now after our break in the action we venture into deeper levels of authoring, such as exploring CSS style code and web authoring tools such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver. We can begin to look at design, the use of tables to control space or style sheet templates to make web authoring more efficient aand uniform.

Unfortunately, there may be too much emphasis on unformity, or what might be regarded as official or traditional perspectives on how a cyberspace ought to be designed. Going through many blogs, I see a definite rebellion against the "official" looks promoted by stylesheets and the like...especially among younger webbites. There has been a grand tendancy to minimalist values, to game strategies, to tiny, tiny, tiny, tinier type.

Ultimately we are alone with our thoughts and our designs, but there is a public lurking out there...eaves dropping on our designs...maybe with designs on our designs. If the medium is the message, then design may say it all. What is the relationship of content to design? Is that important?

PianoGraphique: Technological Awe and Wonder

A wonderful website that weaves a daily tapestry of new and innovative presences on the web is Digital Thread. It has become my mentor, and in educational technology, the role of the mentor is to expose associates and peers to new pathways, and that is is certainly how Digital Thread has served to nourish me over the past few weeks. Every day are new pathways, new discoveries.

One such discovery is Pianographique, a wonder of digital design inspiring me with awe as I engage in the multifaceted, multi-layered concepts of design, creativity, and interactivity. It is a festival of images, sounds, and interactivity. I have a friend who studied cello, but gave it up after he heard Yo-Yo Ma, believing he would never be able to achieve that level of performance. I happen to think that was short-sighted since his knowledge and skill enabled him to understand and value Yo-Yo Ma in a deeply meaningful way. Pianographique is the Yo-Yo Ma of digital web design.

Even though it is finite, the design concepts and performative gestures seem inexhaustible. Ater a couple of hours of fooling around, I still haven't found my way through the entire site. I have yet to create my own "piano."

WARNING: DO NOT GO TO THIS WEBSITE. IT IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR SCHEDULE and WELL BEING. SURFERS HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO DISAPPEAR IN THE DIGITAL ABYSS OF NOW, LOSING ALL TOUCH WITH TIME AND REALITY.

Action Script/Poetry/Witchcraft

Chianan Yen remarked that writing action script reminded him of writing poetry: an economical use of words (every word is important and words have a metaphorical function of referring to an object or action) and similar structure. This is a wonderful metaphor in itself.

In the world of Performance Art, there is a technical term "performative" which refers to words or actions that cause something to happen, such asying "I do" at a marriage ceremony results in a couple being married. Performatives or performative utterances exist on all levels and can be transformative such as when a magician gestures dramatically and shouts "Abracadabra!" and something magically happens.

Action script with Flash operates as strings of performatives. What you write causes something to happen...but it is strict, which is often true of performative utterances. If you don't say it exactly as you should, the spell will not be created. Maybe our modern day cyberspells are a new form of witchcraft, and actionscipt is the secret language that admits you to the Coven of Digital Sorcery.

Describing Process

I am especially interested in how we might use our Blogs to describe our process of creating materials whether it be music, performing, or constructing movies, creating Flash "documents" or designing strategies. I certainly concur with some observations that suggest that reflection might devolve into "philosophizing" and become detached from meaningful discourse.

Bringing things into closer proximity with the Doing and Making is one way of remaining anchored in the reality of our art. Words are more meaningful when they are accountable in terms of actions and objects. This is certainly in the spirit of John Dewey's Art As Experience which remains one of the most import statements about teaching, learning, and making in all arts.

I don't suggest this to be an absolute statement or a prescription. Words are powerful entities when they create a context, and a poem that uses language abstractly can often open up new avenues of perception, awareness, and understanding.