TogsTech

Part 3: The Online Exploration

Welcome to the Third Part of my journey into music and technology and their growing relationship. This week I spent quite a bit of time watching and listening to some of the leading music and non-music educators, as well as people working in music technology’s, views on the growing perspectives and studies based on the pairing of this couple.

James Humberstone

My lecturer, James, posed some interesting points to my peers and I regarding critical thinking in technologically influenced education and gave some insights as to its usefulness. Some interesting points I took from this were regarding the impacts of which technology has on its students. I had never realised the idea that many of our high school students are gathering most of their critical information from social media. He raises the point that most social media sites have an age restriction of 13+. It is important for us to stay correctly informed and continue to utilise contemporary methods of education for us to properly battle these ideas.

Dimitri Christakis

James pointed me in the direction of a few educators who have spoken at Ted Ex functions to share their perspective on education and its relationship to children’s growth. Christakis poses some interesting points in his video about how the rapid changing of scenes and camera shots at a rapid pace drastically impacts a child’s attention problems, especially in the first three years of life where their brain in creating synapses and their brain is tripling in size.

He discusses how these lead to an under stimulated childhood brain and therefore leave with the inability to focus and pay attention. He raises very interesting points and would be really useful to watch if you were fascinated. I did however find that the information struggled to relate to myself as an educator as usually by the time we are dealing with the children, this impact has already been made. He also fails to propose a solution other than essentially going back to old methods of raising children which was somewhat disappointing.

Sugata Mitra

Sugata is an Indian technologist who did some research regarding informal learning approaches to uneducated children in slums that when provided a computer, would teach themselves sufficient English (their non-native language) to be able to play the games on the computer. He makes two quotes that resonated with me during his talk;

‘Encouragement is the key’

‘It is not about making it happen, it is about letting it happen’

These quotes, both about education, tell me that students are clearly able to provide themselves with the information they need to self educate. One of the challenges I forsee in standardised western education however is providing that encouragement to students in things that they do not wish to engage in. This is already present in the teaching of today, I feel that students that take a liking to maths or geography enjoy the class more and are more inclined to do the work to achieve. When the incentive is a game, I believe all students would reach a similar point. I do understand he raises a similar point regarding DNA replication but there is more evidence needed for me to fully understand the depth of the children’s education there.