Yes, I am frustrated. Should not write a blog post. But, coming from a small music university, which can not put resources in to expensive journal databases, really makes my possibilities to conduct research so much more difficult. There is no way to access research conducted by my peers, often working for a government institution. Instead I would have to pay enormous sums of money to access that research. And the money goes to publishing houses. Research conducted with tax payers money should be accessible freely by the tax payers!!!

There is no way of customizing the journals universities order. Instead, I can easily get access to hundreds of articles on agriculture, medical sciences and astrophysics. But only to a few journals on educational technology or music education. Printed journals are much more expensive to maintain, they take a lot more time to “come out”. And, most people prefer to print only the articles they need from online data bases anyway. So, they are a waste of natural resources too in my mind.

I think publishing houses have a tight hold on universities, especially on the days of the Internet. It would probably be not more expensive to publish in open journals & pay someone to edit the articles & take care of the referee-process. Universities could form alliances to do that. Would be so easy today.

I would HIGHLY recommend tools like the Open Journal System. It offers tools for all involved in a process of publishing (exept the publishing houses). That includes tools for the author, editor & referees. There are currently over 1400 Journals available through that system.

But now I am left to only to that academic research, which I have access to. Frustrating.

Wikiaudio is a new Wiki that presents very useful information on audio, recording techniques and equipment, music software and so on. Lot of explanations on concepts. And, of course anyone is free to contribute, so please do! We need more of these kind of sites. Complete, or correct if you find mistakes or incorrect information. They offer a quick way to approach information on on-demand basis.

I noticed it has been over a year since the last time I wrote about our learning material projects. Since I have more Finnish readers, I felt that I should let them know that there are new projects and that they can be now found on one page (in Finnish). In particular, I was involved with the Audacity-project, where Kuisma Eskola built a quite comprehensive site on using Audacity in schools. I hope we get funding for translation of this and several others. Most of the pages are done by the very skilled Outi Parkkila.

www.songfacts.com is a nice site offering information about many popular songs. There is information about the origins and backgrounds of the songs, as well as interpretation about the meaning of the lyrics and so on – depending on the song. And there are discussions about the songs by the users, of course. I see some educational use for this: students are often interested about what the lyrics actually mean. These meanings are often discussed in music classrooms.

Nokia reports on a survey on consumer’s role in media creation, which they had conducted with The Future laboratory. They predict that by 2012, 25% of content consumed will be created and consumed within consumer communities. Well, really not a surprise, when you look at how rapidly the peer-related culture consuming has exploded with online music communities, Youtube etc. Entertainment will be circular. In my view, it has been that for many for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Wikifonia is a new(?)site, where people can publish their own music as well as arrangements of copyright protected music. Music sheets can then be downloaded as pdf files or saved as music xml files. There is quite a few copyright protected songs, but the site claims that they compensate the authors. I wonder how.. and where they get the money.

Youtube made an interesting deal in England, according to Reuters. Google, who owns Youtube, will pay royalties to MCPS-PRS Alliance, the UK group that collects royalties for more than 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers.” This means that around 10 million musical works will be licenced, and thus legally played as backing tracks in youtube videos. However, this seems to concern mostly British songwriters, composers and publishers (50 000 of them). Hopefully this will be a lasting and spreading trend. I wonder whether this applies to music videos and rare live footage in Youtube, which I find extremely valuable cultural information. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been browsing through Myspace, since so many musicians and music students seem to have their own spaces there, where they promote their new materials and upcoming gigs, as well as interact with other musicians and their fans.

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James Frankel has found TeacherTube, a youtube-like videoservice for the use of educators. It has quite a few videos that might interest music educators or music students. I hope this grows, because it is quite hard to find good quality educational videos in youtube. A different rating system for both registered students and teachers would be useful! So, keep on contributing! Don’t hide your valuable work!

I was looking at different open conent projects, and ran in to HippoCampus Project, which is a part of Monterey Institute’s National Repository of Online Courses. I listened a part abou the Outbreak of WWII in the History part. Great documents in multimedia format, that can capture students’ attention, no doubt. BUT here we run in to trouble! There was a quite fatal error: The narrator was saying that “Soviet Union invaded Finland and the Baltic States”. This is most certainly not true and quite insulting to Finnish WWII veterans. My point: a multimedia presentation with narrator, pictures, videoclips etc. is quite hard to correct and there is NO possibility for comments (I did send them feedback!). If this information was in Wikipedia, which has been critisized of being full of false information it would have been corrected by someone with the correct facts. Thus, new forms of publishing allow also a more reflective approach to learning.