Both sides Now.. Designing an online community for creative musical activities and learning

Both Sides Now.. Designing an online community for creative musical activities and learning Miikka Salavuo Sibelius Academy

“ The challenge for music teachers is to create scaffolding structures which are sufficiently integrated with the third environment to provide knowledge, skills and even resources to support it, yet to remain sufficiently distant from it”
(Hargreaves et al. 2003).

The context
The culture is changing rapidly
The change is more a cultural than technological
Participatory culture and user generated content on the rise
Connectivism , networked society (Siemens 2006), (informal) communities of practice (Wenger 1998); communal constructivism (Holmes et al. 2001)
Skills of lifelong learning being realized
Institutional online education relies often on paradigms of teacher-led and content-centred education
Collaborative activities not flourishing in institutional online courses
Engaging in activities to get grades

Research on online communities
A Finnish mikseri.net -community
100 000 members, almost 90 000 songs
Learning does take place in discussion forums (Salavuo & Häkkinen 2005)
Reasons to contribute & participate
to have one’s music heard by others,
to receive feedback,
to listen to peers’ music & give feedback (Salavuo BJME 3/2006)
HOWEVER : Constructive feedback not as common as it could be!
Individuals may disappear into the masses

The purpose of Funkdammen
To construct an environment, which motivates for creating and sharing music and for collaborating and learning
To support out-of-school activities and integrate them to school activities

To enhance the sense of community among musicians
To connect (young) musicians for new collaborations
To encourage composing, recycling, remixing, recreating
To experiment on novel environments that would resemble communities of practice (Wenger 1998)

Important starting points
Small enough for individuals to stand out, large enough for diversity to prosper
Diverse expertise, “cognitive diversity” (Brown et al. 1993)
Allowing various forms of musical expression
Grant the ownership of the environment to its users

Description of Funkdammen
An online community for a geographically scattered Swedish-speaking minority (6% of p0pulation)
Contributing music, loops and samples; describing them
Rating & reviewing contributions (feedback)
Possibility to create remixes of loops or original songs
All materials protected by CreativeCommons license
A song writing contest was launched to motivate people to join
5 voted by professional artists to record in a professional studio
Winner will make a music video

Experiences from the first months
350-400 registered users
130 songs contributed by over 40 artists
Site visited daily by 50-150 different users
0-20 reviews, 1-80 ratings
Discussions at the forum mainly procedural, revolve around the contest

Reviews
Preliminary study on the reviews based on theories of collaborative learning and research on web-based discussions
No big difference between professional artist and user reviews
Most peer-to-peer feedback “cumulative” (Mercer 1996)
e.g. “good voice”, “love the song”, “excellent guitar playing”...
Many artists reply to reviews (sign of participation) (Sfard 1998)

Examples of reviews
Related to producing, arranging, quite often to form
"Chorus could be longer / shorter”
“ I like the (e.g. vocoder effect, guitar distortion) effect”
Related to mixing or tempo (simple parameters)
” The vocals are not loud enough in the chorus”
“ The song could be slower/faster”

Comments related to style or personal preferences ( descriptive )
” ..a little less 80's and a little more rock would work for me”
“ Sounds a bit like [a name of a famous band]”
Artists sometimes clarify what they had used to produce something
“ the vocoder effect is an autotune+high pass filter”)
More reviews on songs with vocals
Few key members give constructive feedback
They should be rewarded for doing so

Importance of feedback
Expert and peer feedback have striking effect on motivation
Teachers & professional artists should be encouraged to give constructive feedback
It takes only a few minutes to write constructive comments

Way ahead
A wiki is included to allow creation of learning materials according to demand
Motivating people, especially professional artists and teachers to join!
Educating teachers to be able to aid in producing and recording music
Creating a concept for micro-communities
Folk music, classical composers etc.
Adding advanced features
Joined a pan-European project of musical data mining

http://www. funkdammen . fi
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcHost
http: //ccmixter .org
http://www. mikseri .net/
http: //weblog . siba . fi/msalavuo

http://miikkasalavuo.fi	72
http://weblog.siba.fi	1
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Both sides Now.. Designing an online community for creative musical activities and learning

by Miikka Salavuo on Apr 23, 2007

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Both sides Now.. Designing an online community for creative musical activities and learning — Presentation Transcript