The Flat World

The title of this blog post alludes to a reference made in the inaugural reading for Module 1 of "Technology Assisted Music Learning" (MUE6696), a graduate course at the University of Florida. In the text (Music Learning Today), Bauer (2014) cites Thomas Friedman, who contends that technology is a major contributing factor to what he calls the "flattening" of the world (p. 4). Not to be confused with the polemical "flat earthers," this notion of a flattening world posits the idea that the historic barriers that geography (manifested in space and time) posed to human civilization are vanishing as a result of the ever-expanding technological advances of the same. The advent of affordable, user-friendly hand-held computers (masquerading under the auspices of "phones") and the ubiquity of the internet have made it so that the average person can have access to nearly the full wealth of human knowledge at any time and in almost any place.

Individuals born into this context are referred to in the text as "digital natives," while those born before this period are "digital immigrants" (p. 5ff). While there is some dispute concerning what constitutes the so-called Digital or Information Age in terms of starting date, if we are strictly speaking of the ubiquity of the information available on the internet, one might say that I was born on the cusp of this epoch. I can remember a time before having a computer in my home, then going through the period of "dial-up" and snail-speed internet access. Still, some of my earliest and formative experiences are from the Internet. I regularly engaged in online debate forums from about age 9, and have been a frequent computer user ever since.

But I did not have a smart phone until well into my college years. And many of the social networking platforms utilized by my students are foreign to me. Keeping abreast of the media used by the younger generation today is a real challenge in this regard, and ensuring technological resources remain relevant is something I have spent time thinking about to this end. This provides a sort of segue into the next area discussed in module 1, which is the role of technology in education.

From the time I started middle school, my teachers have made use of SmartBoards for educational purposes. In elementary school, these were often used ineffectively (occasionally, as backgrounds for overhead projectors!) due to their novelty. But by high school, nearly all of my teachers used them regularly for multimedia presentations. Having grown up with this standard, I have naturally incorporated it where appropriate in my pedagogy as well, fine-tuning it to accommodate the specific content at hand. Unbeknownst to me prior to viewing the lecture video for this module, there is actually a model called TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge) that deals with the intersection of area-specific content, pedagogy, and the effective use of technology.

To use a more pointed example, I would submit the Incredibox application we utilized in this week's module as a way to examine TPACK in action. Effectively utilizing this application in a classroom setting would require an instructor to possess basic content knowledge pertaining to musical areas like form and rhythmic groupings. The instructor's pedagogical knowledge would have to be such that he or she could effectively communicate not only these basic principles, but also how to effectively use the application to demonstrate and enable his or her students' self efficacy to create their own mixes incorporating these ideas. Finally, the instructor would have to make sure that the application fits into the curriculum agenda and goals for his specific context  and is able to be utilized with the technological resources at hand.For my own part, I can readily envision utilizing the application in such a way.

To wrap up this module 1 blog post, I would like to make note of the new Personal Learning Network (PLN) that I have established as a part of this course. While I am an avid user of social media, Twitter is not a medium I have ever considered in a professional context. It has been interesting over the course of the week to view my classmates' posts and see how "tweeting" can be an effective way to collaborate and share strategies. I look forward to seeing its application in the weeks ahead.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York City: Oxford University Press.