elearning for music

This is my practice-run at an abstract! The theme is ‘For the learner or by the learner?’ and ‘Individual or Institutional’.

ccmmusic.ning.com is a social network for current and former students and staff of the large music department at City College Manchester, It has been running since September 2007 and sprang out of 2 specific needs identified by students: 1] the lack of connections between courses and campuses, 2] the lact of a homepage and online identity in the college Moodle A 3rd impetus for the network came from my personal experience of teaching and learning in the Moodle environment. where it became clear that activities are more valuable than resources. This is no surprise, as the good practice of the classroom will translate into good practice online. And a 4th impetus came from the JISC funded project SPLICE, run by Mark Johnson at Bolton University, to explore social networking in the creative industries. The social network uses the Ning service and some students have been quick to exploit it, connecting and collaborating in ways that would not have happened otherwise. But other benefits are becoming apparent; learners are gaining confidence in self publishing and networking, they are no longer constrained by the institutions timetable and class structures, they are in one big class, exploring the aspects of music that most interest them, they are getting (and giving) peer feedback, they are able to dictate the space and be content creators. A video tour of the network (recorded in December 2007) is at homepage.mac.com/ccmmusic/ccmmusicning.mov

. Even staff are blogging - reflecting on their professional development and sharing this with the community. In many ways, promoting learning in a social network is counter-institutional, even subversive, but it is putting the learner first, in an environment where learners taking part is more important than teachers delivering. It feels like I’ve created a space, put some cool facilities in there, then chucked the learners in to get on with it! The site has by no means reached critical mass and I am still exploring ways to drive it. The next step is to replicate the benefits of guest lectures in the online environment. Music professionals are being funded to ‘hang out’ in the network for a week and stir things up a bit, by responding to discussions, blogs and student work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under ccm elearning, elearning and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.