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An Open House for Open Source

ubuntu studio

Who would have thought that with Windows Vista fast going down in history as the slowest, most cumbersome and least intuitive operating system, that a solution was right under my nose all along? Up until last weekend, I’d long since known about Linux, but had put off giving it a try – making every excuse from concerns about navigating through the technical difficulties of installation, to my rustiness with unix commands, to finding enough space on my PC hard disk.

But finally, my moment arrived and I took the plunge. The final incentive? When browsing a wikipedia page on one of the most common distributions, Ubuntu, I discovered a spin-off distribution by the name of Ubuntu Studio. For anyone unfamiliar with this distribution (or with Linux in general), Ubuntu Studio combines a very formidable set of open source audio and video applications, allowing the user to do just about everything: score-writing, accessing software instruments, sequencers, multi-track recording, along with image editing and video production. Best of all, the whole operating system is designed for audio/video production, which means that applications have CPU priority where they wouldn’t in other OS environments. Once I took a look at all the applications available from the start menu straight after installation, my eyes glazed over. Scary to think of all the possibilities, isn’t it?

As a humble teacher (and part-time bedroom musician), this will take some time to get my head around, both technically and conceptually. Audio/video software has long been the domain of companies with extremely wide profit margins, pushing many would-be students, musicians, small-time producers and artists into obtaining pirated software via torrents and in copyright-lax countries like China and Indonesia (leaving aside the issue of the average Indonesian needing to sacrifice an entire six-month salary to afford legal software for themselves in the first place).

Open source is fast taking over the world because its simple democratic principles of free-choice and freedom of speech mean that the operating systems and applications just keep getting better and better. The big question to ask now is – how can I use this in the classroom? Any thoughts?

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Fifteen minutes of fame…

Some say that Andy Warhol was a visionary when he predicted in 1968 that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” With the explosion of web 2.0 and the constant demands of maintaining the interest of the online world’s alarmingly short collective attention span, sensationalism of the kind Warhol may have been thinking certainly reigns supreme.

The main question is, then, how does one plan on spending this technologically- assured window of opportunity? Having recently purchased eight digital cameras for my school, I’m delighted to see that by bringing filming into the classroom, we can teach our kids to do much more than set up 24 hour webcams in their bedrooms or film themselves doing chicken dances to broadcast to the world. In Year 8 English, we’ve been exploring some of the rudiments of Project Based Learning through a film activity which involves developing and filming a pretend news program. Students assume one of the following roles (the numbers and natures of which can be adjusted to suit your class):

Graphic designers

Floor manager

Reporters (local interest, overseas, weather, entertainment, political, etc.)

Director

Editors

Camera operator

Musicians/composers

Here’s a video of my class discussing some of their roles and some of the footage from the final cut:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsWXxUNFDQc&hl=en]

Each role has a clear set of responsibilities which can either be specified on a role sheet or negotiated at some point. Students need to understand their role in the context of other students’ roles and navigate through the various obstacles that naturally get in the way of bringing the program “to air.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, kids take this kind of activity very seriously, as it relates strongly to real life circumstances, is a lot of fun and allows them to tap into their own “fifteen minutes of fame.”

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Musical Mashups and Radiohead

Thom Yorke

Since the start of my life as a high school Music teacher five years ago, I’ve been steadily exploring the potential of multi-track recording (recording, editing and mixing audio files) in the classroom. It’s amazing to note how technology has really made this accessible in recent years. What was formerly the domain of cashed up producers and musicians mortgaged to the eyeballs is now in the reach of anyone with a computer, microphone, pair of headphones and freeware program like Audacity. It’s also interesting to read and hear about non-Music teachers who are using multi-track recording to create radio-plays, advertisements and other interesting audio podcasts. Still, what’s got my attention in this exciting and unpredictable world of web 2.0 is the “mash-up” potential of what we create. In multimedia circles, this might mean creating a piece of music incorporating midi material from the wonderfully free and ever improving Finale Notepad in an Audacity project. The resulting mix-down might be imported into iMovie or Moviemaker, along with an animation from humble but effective programs like Monkeyjam (for stop-motion animation using a webcam and anything from plasticine to Barbie dolls) or Pivot Stick Animator.

What’s really exciting for me as a Music teacher, is British band Radiohead’s recent decision (read the BBC article) to release their second single “Nude” as a series of individual instrument tracks with accompanying project files for Garage Band and Logic. What an incredible creative decision – to share the composition process with one’s fans!

Lucky for me – I’m a devoted fan and have quite a few Music students in my classes who are like-minded. We’re going to have fun next term!

Watch this space!