The Future of Course Materials, part 1

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Jan 202012
 

I know, I haven’t blogged since November. Bad, bad blogger. I also apologize for blogging mostly about teaching and less about music recently. That trend will continue below, but I promise to write about some music in the coming weeks.

books

photo by brewbooks

A recent discussion with some colleagues at Grand Valley State has recently prompted me to wonder whether textbooks are still necessary for certain subjects (if not all of them). Each semester on the first day of classes, I go over a syllabus with my students. In that syllabus, there is usually at least one textbook and a CD that my students are required to purchase. I have actually had a student come up to me after the first class and say “I’m getting paid on Friday and then two Fridays after that. I can only afford to buy one of the course materials with each paycheck. Which one should I get first?” The web can and should solve this problem. Could a carefully cultivated website with a curated list of links and thoughtful commentary replace a textbook? Could a YouTube playlist and embedded videos in that site replace academic recording anthologies?

I’m going to take a few blog posts and discuss my thoughts on these questions. In this first post, I’d like to examine the virtues of the current system of textbook publishers. These are some of the things that I think a new, technology-based solution should maintain. Please share your thoughts below.

1) Books and CDs can be accessed anywhere at any time.

This is so obvious that it may be easy to overlook when examining eBooks and the web. Books do not require any other thing to use. They don’t require any particular computer software, an internet connection, or even power. CDs require a CD player and power, but a portable CD player and batteries can be had for less than $30 at the local WalMart (or Amazon). While this standard accessibility and compatibility isn’t completely achievable with digital alternatives, we need to get as close to it as we can..

2) Books and CDs are persistent.

If a student likes a course or finds it particularly useful (Hey, it could happen!), she has the option of keeping the course materials as a reference. She did not purchase a temporary license to content, but physical goods. If she doesn’t like the book, she can recover some of its purchase price by reselling it. The CD may be replaced by another audio format, but the student can always keep a local digital copy on her computer that is hers forever. Since she has a local copy of both the CD and the book, they can’t be changed or taken away by anyone else. Any digital alternative should be as portable as possible.

3) Books have a single scholarly viewpoint.

This is perhaps the single greatest advantage to the current system of textbooks. There is such an overwhelming quantity of knowledge in the world, and a good textbook author filters and organizes it with skill and care. Explaining complex subjects often requires initial simplification, long-running analogies, selective sequential presentation, and an internal consistency that may not reflect the use of this knowledge “in the wild.” Digital course materials must be more than the results of a Google search on the topic. Importantly, they still require the insightful input of scholars.

4) Books are written by other people.

Admittedly, this is not always a benefit. I have blogged previously about my disagreements with various textbook authors. Having said that, the major benefit of using somebody else’s textbook is that I don’t have to spend the time curating my own. Digital materials could be infinitely customizable, but they should not require infinite customization.

5) Books compensate authors.

Publishers pay authors to write textbooks. They edit, typeset, produce, market, and distribute them. It is prohibitively difficult to “pirate” a physical book. I do not think we should make it prohibitively difficult to copy and share digital course materials. The music industry has already proven to us that this is technologically impossible. In future postings, I will examine how we might generate enough revenue to compensate scholars for their contributions to digital course materials.

6) Books have cultural authority.

This is perhaps the steepest hurdle that digital materials have to climb. In the half-millennium since Gutenberg, books have become thought of as authoritative. Information “printed in black and white” is, for better or worse, thought of more highly than information gleaned on the web. Anyone can publish on the web, and readers are right to be skeptical of a medium with no barrier for entry. Academia is notoriously slow to change, and as new and innovative course materials take forms that gradually deviate more and more from Gutenberg’s bible, these new materials will have to work harder and harder to prove their reliability and trustworthiness.

I will continue posting about the future of course materials, discussing the ways new media might co-opt some of these benefits of books, how it might improve upon books, and how we might begin to create this new generation of educational content.

In the meanwhile, please share your thoughts in the comments. This is a work in progress. I am examining this concept because I am interested in trying to build these new materials. If this is a project you would be interested in (either contributing to or using), please email me or find me on Twitter.

Reliable Sources

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Nov 072011
 

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a geek. I probably spend more time thinking about the web than most people. I probably spend a lot more time thinking about the web than most of my students. This can lead to problems when I say things like, “Sure, use as many web sources in your research project as you’d like. Just use your best judgement in evaluating what would make a credible source.”

In my MUS 218 World Music classes today, we talked about how to determine whether a web page might be reliable enough to be cited in a research paper. Here’s my presentation (Google Docs presentations). I’m publishing it here in part because someone might find it useful. However, I’m mostly sharing this with the world because I know there are lots of people who have spent more time thinking about this stuff than I have, and I’m hoping they might be willing to help me refine it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

 

(PS – I know the GDocs embedded version chops off a little bit of the right side of each slide. Go fullscreen to fix it if you like.)

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Steve Martin meets Bartók

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Sep 172011
 

Drew McManus of Adaptistration posted a hilarious video excerpt this week from a Steve Martin comedy special, Steve Martin’s Best Show Ever (1981). In the sketch, the brilliant and talented Martin struggles to find a way to incorporate a performance of a Bartók string quartet into his comedy special. Hilarity ensues.

from Adaptistration:

If you take anything away from that clip, I hope it’s this: we’ll be better off with relevancy when we stop trying so hard and just learn how to laugh at ourselves.

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Introducing Ritual

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Sep 152011
 

I ask my Music 100 1 students to attend one concert during the semester and write a written response. I’m sure there will be some interesting responses, but that’s a topic for another post. In preparing my students for this assignment, I asked them to read an excerpt from Jonathan Bellman’s A Short Guide to Writing About Music on reviews. I also gave them some links to recent NY Times classical music reviews. The last thing I did was explain the ritual that is Orchestra Concert. My explanation when something like this:

While the audience is finding their seats, the members of the orchestra will gradually find their seats on the stage. They will be playing and warming up during this time. When the lights go out, the hall will get quiet. The concertmaster 2 will come out. Despite the fact that he or she has yet to do anything at all, the audience will applaud, and the concertmaster will bow. The concertmaster will turn his or her back to the audience. The oboe will play a note, and the ensemble will join. This may be repeated. Then, the conductor will come out and receive the same treatment as the concert master. He or she 3 will then begin the concert.

At this point, I was unsure of how to proceed. I think that in general, not clapping between movements is kind of dumb and arbitrary. Do I tell them the custom and perpetuate it? Do I tell them to be sure to clap despite the disapproving stares they will inevitably get? Or do I tell them nothing about this custom and let the chips fall where they may? My cop-out was something along the lines of “I think this custom is kind of arbitrary, and it certainly isn’t how Mozart and Beethoven heard their music performed. However, it’s important to me that you feel comfortable attending as many concerts as you want to.”

Yet another ritual.

Did I do the right thing here? What would you/have you told your friends and students attending an Orchestra Concert for the first time.

Notes:

  1. Introduction to Music Literature, AKA Music Appreciation ↩
  2. We’d just finished talking about sections of the orchestra and what the concertmaster does. ↩
  3. Though in all likelihood, he. ↩
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Melody is the pretty part.

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Sep 072011
 

And now it’s time for another installment of our sporadic series “Sh*t My Texbook Says.” 1

Let me share with you the first paragraph of Dr. Wright’s excellent essay “Understanding Poetry” on melody:

A melody, simply put, is the tune. It’s the part we sing along with, the part we like and are willing to listen to again and again. TV pitchmen try to entice us to buy a CD set of “The Fifty All-Time Greatest Melodies,” but not a similar collection of rhythms or harmonies. Rhythm and harmony are merely supporting actors; melody is the star. The more the melody shines, the more beautiful is the music.

Had I not been sitting in a public place when I read this, I may have thrown the book across the room. First off, saying that the melody is the tune is completely useless. They are synonyms, and it’s important for students to know that the words are more-or-less interchangeable. However, if we’re trying to teach students to listen thoughtfully and make empirical observations about music, we’re going to need a better tool.

Second, rhythm cannot be separated from melody. We like to say that melody is a sequence of pitches. That’s a nifty saying, but it is most certainly not true. It isn’t just the order of the pitches that defines a melody, it’s also the rhythm in which those pitches occur. Rhythm is also more fundamental to the way we perceive sounds. You cannot hear a pitch without it occurring in time (rhythm), but you can definitely hear a rhythm without a definite pitch. (Take a moment here to clap a clave rhythm for yourself. You’ll feel better. I promise.)

Finally, Dr. Craig-M-Wright-PhD’s last sentence might as well end “…and therefore is better and more valuable than music that does not emphasize melody, but that stuff’s not really music anyway, right?”

Reading this book always reminds me of this:

Notes:

  1. The textbook in question is Listening to Music by Dr. Craig M. Wright, Ph.D. ↩
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Oh! So THAT’S what I’m doing wrong…

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Aug 292011
 

First day of school here at Grand Valley State. In honor of that, I thought I’d share some more from this music appreciation text. I have a feeling that “Dave argues with a textbook” might become a running series here on the blog. We’ll see. Just a few grafs after the quote from my last post, I found this gem.

Briefly defined, music [emphasis in original] is the rational organization of sounds and silences passing through time. Tones must be arranged in some consistent, logical, and (usually) pleasing way before we can call these sounds “music” instead of just noise.

Seriously? We’re still using a value judgement in the definition of an art form? Rational, logical, and pleasing are a matter of cultural inheritance and personal taste. Also, “just” noise? Dr. Wright, what the heck is wrong with noise? Some people like it so much they make music out of it! Definitions like this remind me of early DSM definitions of homosexuality as a psychological disorder. Over 40 years after Stonewall, the Psychology world has since corrected their initial mistake. Almost 60 years after Cage’s 4’33″, at least some musicologists like Dr. Wright are still working things out.

[Dr. Craig M. Wright] is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on composers ranging from Leoninus to Bach. [hyperlinks added]

Whoa! All the way to Bach? That’s a little edgy for me. Can we pull it back to Lully?

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Cut the Magic

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Aug 262011
 

I’m teaching a new (to me) class this semester, Introduction to Music Literature, AKA Music Appreciation. The textbook we’re using (not my pick) is Craig Wright’s Listening to Music. Let me share a brief quote with you from the first page of Chapter 1:

Want proof of the allure of music? Next time you’re riding on a bus, a train, or the subway, look around and you’ll find that about twice as many people are listening to music as are reading. This is true pretty much everywhere around the developed world. But why does music have such universal appeal? Simply said, music has power.

First of all, if this were Wikipedia, I’d log in and put a [citation needed] after that glaring statistic. “4 out of 5 dentists” works great in a toothpaste ad, but I think it’s ok to expect more out of academic writing than a 15-second spot on local television.

More importantly, can we ditch this “music is magic” stuff? Yes, music is great. I like it. I’ve spent a lot of time studying it, and I plan to spend a lot more. However, making it into this ethereal, supernatural entity makes it almost impossible to having a meaningful discussion about. The people on the subway aren’t listening to music; they’re just letting music fill in the space around them because it’s preferable to whatever other sounds (or lack thereof) are naturally there. As I see it, my job as a music appreciation teacher is to demonstrate to my students that actual listening requires something more akin to the attention and engagement of reading a book or newspaper. That, dear reader, is music appreciation.

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Orwell Corollary

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Jul 092011
 

I happened to be reading a book by Brian Christian called The Most Human Human 1, which deals a lot with human language, when I wrote that last blog post/rant about the way musicians talk and write about music. In the book, Christian cites a George Orwell essay called Politics and the English Language. I happen to like Orwell, so I checked it out. I found a couple of passages that I thought related to my last post so I thought I’d share.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell is demonstrating how “ugly and inaccurate” language affects politics, but I think it affects the arts as well. By writing thoughtlessly about music, our language becomes less meaningful. Without meaningful language to describe music, we will conceive and thus create thoughtless music. Orwell posits that this kind of writing “consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” (emphasis in original)

He gives five examples of what he calls typical political writing and then lists several common shortfalls demonstrated in the examples. Two of them, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words” are my biggest pet peeves in arts writing. I won’t copy them here; you can check out the essay for yourself. The underlying issue is that people are just putting these word-Legos together because they fist, not because they make a worthwhile thought.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say IN MY OPINION IT IS A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION THAT than to say I THINK.

See! George agrees with me!

Notes:

  1. The Most Human Human is about an annual computer science competition called the Loebner Prize, in which software developers compete in the Turing Test. Alan Turing proposed the test in 1950 as a standard for evaluating a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by conversing with a human. Christian discusses what the research involved in developing these chat bots tells us about what it means to be human. ↩
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Word Up

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Jul 052011
 

I may have mentioned this before in this space, but I’ll say it again: I like words. I like them a lot. Some people have said and written in the past that music is impossible to describe in words. I would never say that putting important and insightful ideas about music into words is easy, but it’s far from impossible. You’ve probably heard the absurdism “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Alex Ross, whose writings about music are among the best in English today, tackles the issue in the preface to his most recent book, Listen to This.

Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about dance.

I fought the urge there to give a longer quote from Ross because his writing is so engaging it can be hard to find a point at which to cut him off. Seriously, you need to get this guy’s writings.

Words

"Magnetic Poetry" by Natalie Roberts (surrealmuse on Flickr)

Anyway, given that writing about the arts is a “curious and dubious science,” I’m prepared to accept many ways of doing things. But please, can we just rein things in a little bit? Don’t use words unless they mean the thing that you mean. I heard a very bright person recently describe a part of a work as being “asynchronous” (not at the same time), when he really meant that it was “asymmetrical” (not the same on both sides). Obviously, this was likely a simple mistake for this guy, and I still have a great deal of intellectual respect for him.

However, composers need to figure out how to talk about their music. I’m as guilty as anyone. In my last post, which I’m embarassed to say was two months ago, I linked to a Michigan Radio story that included an interview of me. When I sat down with the reporter (Jennifer Guerra), I struggled to describe my music to her. In the story, she quipped that my “elevator pitch” could use a bit of work. She was right.

A friend of mine recently described a piece of his on Twitter as being “abstract.” First of all, the artificially-imposed brevity of Twitter can be both a rhetorical blessing and descriptive curse. I understand that it’s not easy to describe a new piece, even without the 140-character restriction. However what could my friend possibly have meant by “abstract”? Was he just trying to tell non-musicians that it’s scary-angsty-dissonant music? If so, is that really the thing you want to squeeze into your 140 characters? Let us assume, for now, that my friend was trying to make his music sound appealing rather than threatening (an assertion which it would be fair to doubt). To me, especially in art, “abstract” means the opposite of “concrete” or “representational.” In this sense, isn’t most music abstract? Surely, Bach was not writing the Goldberg variations to represent sounds heard in nature, right? Of course there is quite an expansive continuum between abstract and representational, but I think most music, especially music that doesn’t use any sampled “found sounds,” falls much closer to the abstract end.

We have to remember that as composers, when we write about our music, our audience has likely never heard it and in some cases never will. When words are all we’ve got (and I think they’re pretty damn good), we have to choose them more carefully. Composers and musicians, how do you describe your music? Is it as big a struggle for you as it seems to me?

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On the Radio

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May 022011
 

When I published the Kickstarter page for the saxophone piece I’ll be working on with Tim Rosenberg, I was only doing it for the massive media coverage it would bring me. Finally, it’s paying off.

About a month ago, I got a phone call from a voice that I hear all the time on Michigan Radio. It was Jennifer Guerra, an arts/culture reporter for a local public radio station. She asked me a few questions about my Kickstarter project. Apparently my answers satisfied her, because a few days later, she met me in the Music Practice Building here at Michigan State. (That’s right, she drove from Ann Arbor to East Lansing to do a story about a composer-student.) I had the reaction that I think a lot of people have when they meet a radio voice in person. As Ira Glass once said, “That’s his voice…and it’s coming out of his head!”

Anyway, you can listen to/read the story here. It just aired today.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jennifer, if you happen to read this, thanks!

Now, you may be wondering, “How did Jennifer Guerra find this schmuck?” I wondered the same thing. So I asked her. She said that she just found me on Google looking for Michigan arts stories. She navigated to my website, saw that it was active, and got in contact. Moral of the story: your web presence is important. It’s getting more important every day. If you’re a musician/artist reading this and you don’t have a website, I hope you’ll consider starting one soon. It’s easier than you probably think.

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