To all music teachers and musicians out there. Would you or your students like to be part of the world’s first online orchestra?
YouTube are inviting musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Your video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best of you to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.”
A fascinating development. If there is a school district or authority out there that is still preventing access to this extraordinary site, send them the link.
Although it’s been out for a while, we haven’t seen any this side of the Atlantic until quite recently, so it was quite a privilege to be able to play with a Microsoft Surface at the Future of Web Apps conference held in London a couple of weeks ago.
While I was having a play, my mind was buzzing with possibilities for how it could be used in teaching in learning. Obviously it would have immediate appeal to spatial learners and those who want to ’show’ what they know or have learned. I could also imagine a small number of students brainstorming together, perhaps using some mind-mapping software and working on individual elements of an issue in ‘their part’ of the display/screen.
There are already some great software and applications written for it (check out the photos on microbiology in the stream above and how it renders 3-D imaging) and the list will only grow as it becomes more mainstream. What’s really important, though, is the notion that it can receive multiple instructions simultaneously through touch - and that makes it immediately appealing for an educational context; even if the price tag doesn’t at US$15,000.
…And if that wasn’t enough, Google have just launched an audio indexing engine for YouTube. Now you can search a video according to what is said within it and not just on the tags, keywords or title describing it.
It’s in beta at the moment, but will graduate into a fully supported technology soon, I’m sure.
A typical response to presentations I have given to IB leadership on social media and education technology is, “That’s all very well, but my school district or education authority bans this technology.”
Well, for all those who are faced with this problem, this video by Michael Wesch is for you. It’s an academic’s response to the transformative power of YouTube and why we need to understand it better. It was presented in June this year, at the US Library of Congress.
The video is nearly an hour long, so it’s best viewed with colleagues and coffee (and possibly at home?).
Michael has published a timeline, which I have copied for convenience below.
0:00 Introduction, YouTube’s Big Numbers
2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams
5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape
12:16 Introducing our Research Team
12:56 Who is on YouTube?
13:25 What’s on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.
17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?
17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and “networked individualism” (Wellman)
18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community
19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation
21:18 YouTube as a medium for community
23:00 Our first vlogs
25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (“context collapse”)
26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)
27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers
29:53 Aesthetic Arrest
30:25 Connection without Constraint
32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture
34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity
34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio
36:55 YouTube’s Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15
39:50 Reflections on Authenticity
41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System
43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture
47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV’s “The Message” and the message of YouTube
49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World
51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973
52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)
Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”
Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.
For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:
Berkeley University, in California, have recently launched a series of recorded lectures on their own YouTube channel. You can find the current catalogue here: Berkeley University on YouTube. It clearly mirrors MIT’s Opencourseware initiative, started in 2001.
It raises the question yet again of where the real value in school- and university-based education lies: in the teacher delivering the content or the collaborative working and investigation by students around it.
Clearly, Berkeley and MIT believe it is in the latter, otherwise they wouldn’t be distributing this content for free. It is the formal accreditation and recognition that surrounds it, which they then charge (huge sums) for.
The trend towards deconstructing territories of learning (a phrase I’ve borrowed from a colleague referring to the classroom rather than a geographical region) continues and I look forward to its development.
In the meantime, have a look at this lecture on atoms and heat:
