1) Proposal Authors and Institutional Affiliations:
Dr. John V. Gilbert
Director of Doctoral Studies
Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions
New York University
Dr. Fred J. Rees
Head, Graduate Program
Indiana University School of Music at IUPUI
2) Proposal Title:
Distance Collaboration for Making, Teaching, and Learning Music
3) Intended Audience:
General
4) Presentation Topic:
Creative Pedagogies/Technological Tools
5) Presentation Format:
Paper
6) Presentation Description
This paper will examine two models of collaboration in which several
electronic media and continuing participation among colleagues and students
are being used to facilitate musical production, teaching, and learning.
The purpose of this session is to review the process of collaboration that
led to creative and pedagogical enhancements in these models beyond that
available in the traditional collegiate curriculum or classroom setting.
Collaboration as a process for engaging in productive pursuits and
educational activities is being applied with increasing frequency around the
world. As the explosion of information afforded by the internet has
overtaken the teacher as arbiter of information, so has the complexity and
diversity of the human world outflanked traditionally held beliefs on what
constitutes credible human production and knowledge. While creative genius that leads to innovation and revolutionary change still emanate from
individual people, the realizations of their ideas and discoveries seem to
be increasingly dependent upon the cooperation of others. Even for the most
independently creative and pedagogically iconoclastic, the ever-changing
expectations of peers and learners for what they wish to use and consume can impose pragmatic alliances that, two decades ago, would not have been
considered. In its most blatant form, these alliances can be seen in
corporate mergers of companies that, prior to their amalgamations, were mean competitors. In education, distance learning, which could reasonably be considered explosive in its growth in recent years, has generated
partnerships between campus and continuing education academic units, school libraries, and computing services in response to institutional needs for
program growth and student revenue.
Collaborations have not always been undertaken just for practical
reasons. In the case of distance learning, cooperation between various
school or campus units provided opportunity to utilize new and emerging
technologies. These tools have affected the means by which courses are
designed, taught, and knowledge acquired by the learner. The combination of expertise and resources from different campus services could provide more sophisticated environments for presenting information and enhancing
learning. Electronic mail, videoconferencing, chat rooms, listservs, and
threaded discussion groups made access to information from course
instructors and fellow students more convenient than the traditional mode of
trying to contact professors outside of their office hours. Many distance
learning initiatives have been concerned with providing expertise as a
service to students who would otherwise not have access to high quality
faculty and institutions Still others have engaged in intriguing distance
collaborations beyond teaching and learning, possibly to test the medium to
see what it could do for them or to bring creative souls from geographical
distant locations and dissimilar disciplines to conduct serious work.
In music, distance collaborations do not abound. Excluding some
exotic events where prominent musicians have performed continentally and
internationally, prohibitive costs and lack of access to high quality video
broadcasting facilities needed for this kind of activity have inhibited more
of them from occurring. In recent years, there have been several semester long music courses offered over the Internet, including one at Illinois State University that incorporated all aspects of the course (including assessments) another at Duquesne University that was taught first using interactive televised instruction and then later over the Internet, and conducting classes taught ITVI at Austin Peay University.
However, there are two other initiatives that, because of their scope and longevity, have been providing insight to the process of distance collaboration. One involves a creative, interdisciplinary project between a
group of musicians, actors, and dancers in the US and Canada that utilizes the technology of the internet. The other is a graduate music education program that uses a statewide ITVI system. Although the subject content of both efforts is different, there are several attributes which they share. They both possess some longevity, with strong student and faculty support, thus suggesting that they possess some ongoing, educationally redeemable value to student and teacher.
The first initiative started in 1996 (with roots going back to 1993), and continues to build upon itself. The second program, which began broadcasting in the Fall of 1993, commenced its third three-year cycle of courses in August of 1999, averaging 24 student enrollments per course. Both efforts include components of student-generated tasks and projects that can build on the work of others, thus requiring collaboration between teachers and students, teachers and teachers, and students and students. Both pivotally rely on electronic technology, with one predominantly web-based and the other dependent on ITVI (making ancillary use of different electronic media). The first initiative fosters collaborations between creative people in several art forms. The second program's curriculum requires music faculty from the disciplines of music education, music theory, and music history to teach through the medium of ITVI. Maybe the most important common feature of both efforts is that they also incorporate new technological developments as they emerge in, in turn, press at the boundaries of electronic media to serve their interests creatively, musically, and pedagogically.
The Cassandra Project has been utilizing the internet as a collaborative medium in the planning stages as well as the actual performances since 1996. This project was an outgrowth of an earlier project entitled "Navigating Global Cultures" that served as an internet forum for artists, teachers, and students in China, South America and the United States. Emerging from this interdisciplinary forum was the Cassandra Project that began as an experiment in exchanging creative materials among three internet locations: