10 Nov
2004
10 Nov
'04
6:34 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 01:33:56PM -0500, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
Ico,
Can you say a bit about the new courses you are going to be teaching?
Are you aware of anything similar being offered at any other
institutions?
Not being geographically limited is one of the greatest benefits of
information available for study on the web. Traditional classroom
coursework can only reach those who can get to the classroom. Freedom of
scheduling is also a benefit of online learning. I ran out of debt
eligibility before I finished my undergraduate degree. I had to get a
job and start working and finish the degree on the side working at it
part time. Now I need to continue working. I can't afford to go to
school full time anymore. But, I still want to continue learning. I
really wish I could give up my job and dedicate all of my time for two
or three more years to learning, but I just can't see how to make it
feasible. I agree that external pressure and deadlines are helpful in
the learning process. My difficulty is not so much postponing the least
urgent or not working hard enough, but rather defining boundaries
between topics ... setting specific goals and sticking to them with out
loosing focus by exploring tangetial subjects.
Anyway, I'm sort of rambling on here. I just know that you are in the
academic world and that amongst other things you are a teacher so I
guess I wonder if you might be able to offer some guidance on how to
continue learning.
Thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to offer.
-Eric Rz.
-----Original
Message-----
From: linux-audio-user-bounces(a)music.columbia.edu [mailto:linux-audio-
user-bounces(a)music.columbia.edu] On Behalf Of RTaylor
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 5:51 AM
To: A list for linux audio users
Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] (OT)
Michael T Nelson <m_nels(a)gmx.net> wrote:
While I agree that a volume of
knowledge regarding GNU/audio stuff is
already available online, for a newcomer it is too fragmented and
incoherent. Furthermore, even if a single unifying resource existed such as
the one you suggested, due to ongoing development in this field, it would
require a significant amount of work to keep it up-to-date (and imho
keeping-up a well-composed prose that could be used for studying something
that is constantly changing requires a lot more work than verbally
explaining them).
Finally, not everyone is prone to learning just by reading and they require
additional stimuli via lectures, assignments, and hands-on work.
Hence, I believe that relying only on the Web content for the general
educational purposes would not carry very far. Sure, it would work for the
minority (esp. those who have mathematical/programming mind and are capable
of learning programming in a particular toolkit just by looking-up API's)
but for the broader population it would end-up being nothing more than a
reference.
As far as Website content being able to offer you the pace of learning that
fits your needs, this in practice never works as it is in human nature to
postpone that which is the least urgent. This would inadvertently lead to
non-systematic learning and therefore mixed results. School programs impose
assignments onto students for reasons other than grading, most importantly
to stimulate student to work hard in order to master the given material. In retrospect, I'd have been better off
finding a degree in Computer
Science with Music Technology. But they don't do that at York, which is:
I've always thought that Gnu {I suppose any organization with a
sufficiently large following and a decent reputation...} should do
something like this... all it would really require is a chartered tour of
several existent web pages, some test with which to judge yourself over
the course of a term and some sort of certification when the candidate
feels that they know enough to be qualified.
Teaching could be done by intelligent, interactive websites from a
knowledge base with a few simplish functions... administering tests,
meteing out the next parts of the lesson plan... maybe a bit of very
specific advice once in a while...
I can't think of a more comfortable way to go to school... you could
schedule stuff however you wanted, etc, etc...