The Place of Music in 21st Century Education - Week 4 - University of Sydney

Here are my comments about the questions of the week 4 in the  course The Place of Music in 21st Century Education - University of Sydney - Prof. dr. James Humberstone

• You were introduced to the DAW (or sequencer), the step sequencer, and a range of notation software. Do you feel you would like to explore any of these technologies further?
• Have you been persuaded that the DJ-producer does have an awful lot of sophisticated musical skills?

I was very impressed with the DAW. I knew about the existence and usage of many of this kind of devices but I had never given me a chance to see it in real use. Amazing. Now I am surely convinced that a DJ and people who use it on studio must have a good music knowledge, even if they don’t play a traditional instrument. On the other hand, I don’t think this will be one thing I put in use in my life, once I work mostly with classical and acoustic guitar music. The other applications used for music notation and studio make part of my life. I make my own scores and arrangements using Encore. I prepare my music to be published in YouTube or as a tool for broadcasting my work in the music production scenario using tools for videos and audios.

• Do you agree with David Price that learning has gone "OPEN"?
• What were the best examples of OPEN learning that you found either in the course content, in your own searching, or the work of your peers?

David Price confirms my belief that now only the one who doesn’t want to learn doesn’t learn. I use open learning tools on the Web for everything: from how to tie a tie, make yoghurt and other recipes and learning more sophisticated stuff as music and languages.

Of course the best examples in open learning that I have been using in the last years are these platforms where we are now doing this course – www.coursera.org – and others like www.futurelearn.com and www.edx.org

• What does Project Based Learning (or the other BLs) have to offer Music Education? And what does Music Education have to offer Project Based Learning, and all learning, in the 21st Century?

PBL can offer a good view of organization, tips for scientific approaches to learning involving the way we put a project on the making. Things like objective, target audience, phases of development and final presentation. This video can offer more information about what PBL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08D0dBGIzYQ

A musician spends a lot of time practicing and trying to find solutions for the problems we face in instrument of theory studies. We have to learn how to organize our study, plan the steps between the stage we find ourselves and what we want or need to reach, select studies in progressive order and specially how to be determined and persistent. Most of what the musicians know they learn by themselves and I think we can be used as a model for other areas of learning.