Connected Blog

Glasgow University has announced an interesting research project looking at social networking of today in comparison to the social networking of the 19th century – conducted through the post office instead of the internet. 

The introduction to the project explains, “Social networking employs the whole range of available communications technologies to a fault; but communication has always exploited available technologies as soon as they become affordable.  From the eighteenth century diaries and correspondence increasingly contained non-textual features or were accompanied by parallel series of commonplace books and albums…. Social networks are certainly more tractable than correspondence by our contemporary postal services, but that is no good reason for concluding that they are novel.  In the nineteenth century Gladstone wrote to his wife three times a day, probably as many times as we in our 24/7 culture would wish to communicate with our partners.  Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria all conducted vast correspondence with their extended families and friends.  Social networking takes place within a public space in contrast to the apparent private space of diaries and letters; but in some contexts there are reasons to question the nature of such privacy.  Some diaries and letters seem to have been written explicitly with publication in view or at least to be read by others than the author or the intended recipient.”

The research will concentrate on a large archive in the National Library of Scotland of correspondence between an 19th-century Edinburgh family and their sister who lived in India. The correspondence includes both letters and sketches of family events, rather like the photos that people put on their blogs and Facebook/MySpace/Bebo sites today. Then the researcher will select comparable social networks and blogs operating now and compare the two.

Among the aims are to find out “Is [it] just a question of the technology employed or does the technology radically alter behaviour?  What type of content is most commonly posted to networks and how does this differ, if at all, from content kept in the analogue and will this have ramifications for future preservation strategies?  Does the apparent abandoning of ‘form’ in the digital communication reduce the trust that users place in social networks?”

 More details on the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute website.

Lucy Crichton

Learning and Teaching Scotland

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12^th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.

Four members of early music specialist choir, The Sixteen and their director Harry Christophers, demonstrated music’s journey from homophonic (Int 2 concept) plainchant (H Music concept) to polyphony (Int 2 concept). Their lively, committed performances, which maximised the acoustics of Notre Dame’s Gothic architecture made it possible to believe that contemporary listeners would have experienced something of the vitality of the Punk revolution in the 1970s. This fresh approach was pioneered by Léonin and developed by his successor Pérotin.

Aside from the obvious connectivity between music and architecture, the links between music and science (notably physics) were explored. Composers, deciding which notes would best fit those already present in the setting of the plainchant would choose intervals (an Int 2 concept), in order, from the harmonic series i.e. 8ve, 5th & 4^th. Although the triad had not yet become the building block of Western harmony, the foundations of the genre had been laid.

Musicologist, Helen Deeming, enthusiastically outlined the possibilities afforded by the second innovation of the time, the development of musical notation. Although the words of the liturgy were written, the associated music was taught by rote and memorised. This meant that, were a new setting to be sent to another cathedral city, a singer, familiar with the music, would have to tag along to coach the choir. Now, the music could be sent and realised from afar.

There remain three more episodes of this promising series. Here are links to details of all episodes, an overview of the series and a reflection on the place of sacred music in a secular world.

Overview of the series

The four episodes: The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina And The Popes; Tallis, Byrd and The Tudors; Bach And The Lutheran Legacy

Richard Langham Smith, Head of Music at the Open University, writes eloquently on Sacred Music in a Secular World.

Is it possible to use a blog to genuinely bring history to life? The answer is a resounding yes as this imaginative blog ably demonstrates.

As many of you may know, as well as being an advocate for all things Web2.0 I’m also a keen student of the Great War. As such, you can probably guess that I was always going to love the WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier blog which is one of the most imaginative uses of the medium that I’ve yet discovered.

William Henry Bonser Lamin was a British soldier during the Great War and the blog consists of the letters he wrote home along with other related documents… the clever bit is that Lamin’s grandson is posting the letters 90 years to the day after they were originally written. This means gaps between posts… sometimes considerable gaps… but this just adds to the reality of the letters. The letters start in February 1917 when Harry is at training camp. There is something extremely human about his mention of being unable to get rid of a cold then immendiately saying “… but I am lucky to keep as well as I do.”

Lamin’s grandson has taken the time to give background on the main players in this story (Posts in October and September 2006), but you will soon begin to know them through reading the letters. One gets a real sense of the agony of waiting for news that those back home must have experienced through having to wait for the next ‘post’ on the blog.

As a teaching tool, the blog has immense potential for English and History, but I think other subjects could tie into the subject matter of the letters. A couple of ideas I had were to get my own class to write letters/replies to Lamin based on what he said, to put themselves in his position and write to their own families, or moving away from the Great War, consider the impact that writing spread over a period of time has compared to the single ‘one-off’ essay that typifies much of the work pupils do. As a means of relating a narrative, it is a wonderful resource. It is also fascinating to see how the way we use language on a day-to-day basis has changed.

As a historic text, I think it would feed easily into the study of the Great War in a History department. I re-discovered on my trip to the Battlefields earlier this year that our pupils may learn the numbers, but it is up to the teachers to put human faces onto those numbers and this blog is a brilliant means of doing so.

If you want to follow Harry’s experiences, you’ll need to do two things. First, you need to start at the beginning of the blog and work your way through to the present day, and then you’ll need to add him to your RSS reader… The first post is HERE if you want to get started.

Finally, one of my favourite museums is the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres / Ieper. When you enter the museum, you are given a barcoded ticket with the name of someone who participated in the Great War printed on it. As you move through the museum you can scan your ticket to find out what happened to your ‘character’… inevitably, some of the characters do not survive and I have always been surprised at the impact these ‘deaths’ have on the pupils I am showing around the museum.

So it is with Harry Lamin’s blog: there are no indications as to Harry’s eventual fate so you’re just going to have to stay subscribed if you want to find out whether Harry made it to the end of the war safely… I’m hooked!

Jim in The Highlands was quick to note Channel 4’s move from £6m per year on educational television programming to a large part of £6m per year on online educational programming. Is educational TV dead on C4? Not quite, but it’s certainly undergone some serious surgery to make it recognisable to a 2008 teen. Channel 4 is certainly living up to its mantra: Do it first. Make trouble. Inspire change. And I’m glad to have been part of it.

Yes, it’s a bold experiment, but no, it’s not to ‘cash in’ on anything. It’s just using the web because that’s what teens and tweens use most, and using the web that they use (adults tend to call it Web 2.0, for them it’s just the web). As Channel 4 remains one of the few television channels in the UK to engage the tricky 14-19 age group (the only one?) this is just one more set of innovations in 25 years of innovation.

I was lucky enough earlier this year to have been appointed member of the fivesome that make up the Education Advisory Board of Channel 4 Television, and I’m very grateful to Learning and Teaching Scotland for supporting my time. I don’t know how much we’ve helped shape the online programming other than saying ‘yes’ a lot, ‘no’ a few times and reassuring Matt Locke, Alice Taylor and Janey Walker that what they are doing is spot on. As Janey put it:

“In all conscience, Channel 4 could not continue to spend £6m on programming that is not engaging people.”

Socially networked, playful, participative content is the only way we can create successful media to engage, motivate and inspire young people “on the box”. The box these days is more likely to be a Nintendo DS screen or PC.

Matt and Alice, the commissioners, are both avid gamers, keen on everything from the world of alternate reality games to playing Zelda on the Nintendo DS. Working through some ideas with them on the Board has been a pleasure, and expanding on some of the ways we can engage young people on this ’slate’ of programming as been incredibly challenging.

Jemima Kiss at the Guardian has the full write-up from the launch of the slate this week, and Kevin Anderson has speed-typed some good Matt Lockisms, but the thrust of development has been along these lines, which might also be interesting to consider for our classrooms and schools:

• The new ‘programming’ online is playful. That doesn’t mean that it’s trivial, but rather it’s about getting young people to participate in the project, create the programme/site/knowledge/learning together. Teens will be encouraged to do this not on some mothership Channel 4 site, but rather on their own Bebos, blogs and Photobucket sites.
• It has a strong social element, so that teens are constantly part of a feedback loop on what it’s like to grow up in 21st Century Britain.
• It’s about ‘playful exploration’. “The BBC tells you what you need to know. Channel 4 helps you ask the right questions.”

I know that Matt and Alice have had to do a heck of a lot of work to convince production companies to change the way they pitch, propose and structure these much more playful, explorative, social ‘programmes’, where the TV programme might come as the end result of a year’s online learning.

The things the indies have come with are great, and I’m so happy we can all start playing/viewing/talking about them:

Gaming projects include City of Vice by Littleloud, which invites
the user to solve historical crimes from Georgian London, and Six to
Start’s project The Ministry, which explores privacy and identity
online.

Phantasmagoria by EC1 encourages web users to explore
their identity by tying together profiles across different social
networking sites. An online project by Maverick Television will
encourage teenagers to use web-based tools that can help them to set up
online businesses.

The broadcaster says it wants to encourage a
more collaborative, supportive environment for young entrepreneurs,
moving away from the cliched and aggressive view of business seen on
programmes such as Dragon’s Den.

One thing is sure: the audience isn’t on the television. So maybe it’s not that “high risk” a strategy after all…

Cross-posted at edu.blogs.com

Cross-posted to Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

While revisiting V. S. Ramachandran’s 4^th 2003 Reith Lecture on synaesthesia, I was struck by the term synaestheticmetaphor. This was raised as one of four possible causes for this neurological phenomenon – which affects 1 in 200.

Artists of all sorts, whose currency is metaphor, constitute 1 in 8 of famous synaesthetes. The example given in the lecture, “this cheese is sharp,” illustrated use of a touch adjective to describe a taste sensation. No doubt you can think of countless examples is everyday use. Naturally, the word sharp caught my attention and, before long, I was considering words in the musical lexicon whose primary meaning either resides elsewhere or approaches the opposite of how we use it.

Take for example the word rest, normally regarded as the opposite of activity. On many instruments, the action required to produce a rest (silence) is no less demanding than the one required to produce a note. The term sharp can be associated with ascendancy in everyday speech e.g. a sharp incline but, given that sharpening a note is the smallest possible increase in pitch, the comparison is not really helpful.

The evolution of music can explain away some of our odd terms:

a semibreve (half-short) is the longest surviving note

quavers are no longer regarded as especially quick

A sense of history can explain some of our anomalies e.g. the fact that four people are required to play a trio sonata.

I think it would be interesting and possibly useful to compile a list of words whose appearance in musical concepts differs from their primary use in everyday speech and, when current pressure to produce ensemble music subsides, I hope to make a start on it.

In the meantime I’d be interested in anyone’s views on the following questions:

1. Is the vocabulary of other subjects in the same boat?
2. Do you think it is helpful or merely distracting to point out such things in a lesson?

It’s amazing what a dispute about composers’ dates can do. In an attempt to prove that Mozart was still alive when Beethoven was born, I entered “composers timeline” into Google and chanced upon a great resource at Classical.net, compiled by Dave Lampson and a healthy team of reviewers and contributors.

On this very scholarly website, composers are categorised in:
master index, quick reference or a list of lists e.g. nationality, anniversary of birth/death, age at death etc.

There are pdf graphical timelines (very impressive - a feast for the eyes on a classroom wall) and text timelines (lists of dates). There is information on composers (including photos/portraits and biographical information) and a guide to basic repertoire – 7 historical periods: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century & Modern (the final two of which enjoy something of an overlap).

The site also sports links to books, book reviews and websites. For anyone interested in the history of western music, this site is well worth a visit.

A pupil from Doune Primary School, explains how the pupils act a junior tour guides at Doune Castle to guide other school children round the castle and explain its history. They dress in medieval costume and have medieval weapons to shwo the visitors.

See more about this podcast or listen to other shows on Connected Live’s podcast page. Or, you can listen by clicking the play button below.