This course will introduce students to the theory of music, providing them with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly. It will cover material such as pitches and scales, intervals, clefs, rhythm, form, meter, phrases and cadences, and basic harmony.
This course is suitable for those who have never studied music academically. It will introduce you to the theory of Western music, providing you with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly.
It will provide the basis for the further study of music both from a theoretical and practical point of view: musicology, pastiche and free composition, analysis, performance, and aural skills.
It will also be useful to experienced musicians without music notation skills who wish to extend their practice through a grounding in the tools of Western music theory and notation.
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from education scholar and Truthdig contributor Mike Rose’s book, “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us,” which is now out in paperback in a new revised and expanded edition.
Deep within our cultural history is a faith in the power of technology to cure social problems. Many of our Utopian visions—from nineteenth century socialist tracts and novels to Silicon Valley’s libertarian futurism—are based on technology. That faith is vibrant today, at times idealistic, at times entrepreneurial, often a blend of the two. Neuroscience will lead to the cure of mental illness and reveal the mystery of consciousness itself. Social media will bring us together across regional and national divides, and the cell phone or tablet computer will provide the platform to lift people in developing countries out of poverty. And, closer to the concerns of this book, online instruction will reduce the cost and improve the quality of education, and high-stakes standardized tests will scientifically measure student learning and teacher effectiveness.
Modern technology, of course, is stunning, and can and should be brought to bear on our social problems, education included. Those who believe deeply in technology’s virtues have reasons for their grand vision. They are well-educated and highly skilled in technology’s devices and systems, and the arguments they offer are articulate and assured. Their education at prestigious schools provides them with potent social networks that contribute to their access to power and philanthropic and venture capital resources. They are positioned to make things happen.
The limitations—and, in some cases I think, dangers—of this faith in technology are contained within its strengths.
The faith in technology can lead to overreach, to a belief that complex human problems can be framed as engineering problems, their social and political messiness factored away. Hand-in-glove is an epistemological insularity, a lack of knowledge about social and cultural conditions—or worse, a willful discounting of those conditions as irrelevant. It is telling how rarely one hears any references to history or culture in the technologists’ discourse. I think the social position of many of the technologists is a factor here: they tend to come from, at the least, middle-class or professional families, and their schooling has sheltered them from intimate knowledge of many of the people they seek to help. Reform movements have often drawn on such elites, and they can bring much needed resources and power to the reform, but their backgrounds can also blind them to conditions on the ground, to the lives they hope to affect.
I want to consider this faith in technology as it relates to education, and I’ll use as my central example MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, which are ever-present in higher education news as I write.
A MOOC is essentially a pre-recorded course, heavy on lecture, so, in that regard, it is not at all new. But it is placed online, making it available to anyone with an Internet connection. The first MOOCs originated in Canada in 2008, then spread to the United States, making a splash as several Ivy League faculty began putting their courses online. “Ivy League for the masses,” announced Time magazine. As MOOCs have developed over the last few years, lectures have been broken up into modular units—easier to process online—and additional instructional materials have been added along with limited means for participants to interact with faculty and students via an electronic forum. There are also attempts, not without considerable complication, to address the issues of testing, grading, and course credit.
Imagine a guy on a remote ranch in Montana or a young woman in Manila learning electrical engineering from MIT’s finest. One catches the idealistic thrill of this idea in Daphne Kohler’s TED talk on MOOCs—Kohler is a distinguished computer scientist at Stanford and a driving force in the MOOC enterprise—as she offers a vision of high-quality education spread across the globe via the Internet, solving the problem of access and availability. Over the last year or so, increasing numbers of colleges and universities have been signing up for MOOCs or even developing their own, and the courses are expanding from the originally top-heavy sciences and engineering to include the social sciences and humanities, and even some remedial courses.
I have been around higher education for a long time, and I can’t recall an innovation taking off like the MOOC has. There are several reasons. The humanitarianism of massive reach and open access across the planet has captured the fancy of big time public voices, including those on the New York Times Opinion Page. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, technological idealism readily morphs with entrepreneurship, and many of the MOOC luminaries have formed both for-profit and non-profit companies that engage in the hard sell. There is a lot of hype generated around MOOCs: they are part of a “tsunami” or an “avalanche” about to hit higher education—or they are higher education’s “Napster moment.” The hyperbole has gotten so strong that suddenly some within the MOOC venture are trying to dial it down a notch. A third, and huge, factor is that college administrators and state legislators see MOOCs as a way to reduce the soaring costs of higher education as well as to provide access to high-demand classes. (...)
Behavioral economics couples scientific research on the psychology of decision making with economic theory to better understand what motivates financial decisions. In A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, you will learn about some of the many ways in which we behave in less than rational ways, and how we might overcome our shortcomings. You’ll also learn about cases where our irrationalities work in our favor, and how we can harness these human tendencies to make better decisions.
This course will draw heavily on my own research, and pulls largely from my three books: Predictably Irrational (2008), The Upside of Irrationality (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (2012). We will examine topics such as our “irrational” patterns of thinking about money and investments, how expectations shape perception, economic and psychological analyses of dishonesty by honest people, how social and financial incentives work together (or against each other) in labor, how self-control comes into play with decision making, and how emotion (rather than cognition) can have a large impact on economic decisions. This highly interdisciplinary course will be relevant to all human beings.
I recently started one on the science of climate change. No policy, just the science. It is offered through the edX program sponsored by MIT, Harvard, UC/Berkeley, and U Texas (among others). Upcoming courses include -
- History of Chinese Architecture - Wiretaps to Big Data: Privacy and Surveillance - Fundamentals of Immunology - Intro to Aeronautical Engineering - Intro to Computational Thinking - Great Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe
I recently started one on the science of climate change. No policy, just the science. It is offered through the edX program sponsored by MIT, Harvard, UC/Berkeley, and U Texas (among others). Upcoming courses include -
- History of Chinese Architecture - Wiretaps to Big Data: Privacy and Surveillance - Fundamentals of Immunology - Intro to Aeronautical Engineering - Intro to Computational Thinking - Great Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe
This course will introduce students to the theory of music, providing them with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly. It will cover material such as pitches and scales, intervals, clefs, rhythm, form, meter, phrases and cadences, and basic harmony.
This course is suitable for those who have never studied music academically. It will introduce you to the theory of Western music, providing you with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly.
It will provide the basis for the further study of music both from a theoretical and practical point of view: musicology, pastiche and free composition, analysis, performance, and aural skills.
It will also be useful to experienced musicians without music notation skills who wish to extend their practice through a grounding in the tools of Western music theory and notation.
I've been meaning to pick up a guitar and start learning (for about the last 3.5 decades) and this looks perfect. Maybe I'll have my ducks in a row next time it comes around.
Now there's an idea. We have an antique piano that was given to us by a client...
My pleasure. If you happen to do one, I'd like to hear about it (good or bad).
As for massive, the one I'm currently doing reported it has 142,000 participants. It does make for a lively community with people from just about anywhere.
My next one will probably be some social sciences topic.
I've been meaning to pick up a guitar and start learning (for about the last 3.5 decades) and this looks perfect. Maybe I'll have my ducks in a row next time it comes around.
My pleasure. If you happen to do one, I'd like to hear about it (good or bad).
As for massive, the one I'm currently doing reported it has 142,000 participants. It does make for a lively community with people from just about anywhere.
My next one will probably be some social sciences topic.
A Massive Or Outline Course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user fora that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.
Although early MOOCs often emphasized open access features, such as connectivism and open licensing of content, structure, and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources, some notable newer MOOCs use closed licenses for their course materials, while maintaining free access for students. (...)
Just to see how the concept works, and get some skillz at the same time, I've started an Android Apps 101 course about six weeks ago (with 2 more weeks to go).
So far, it's been been a lot of fun with a very reasonable workload (4-8 hours a week, which you can pretty much do in a day on the weekend or spaced out over the week).
It does make for a lively community with people from just about anywhere.