An examination of alignments and misalignments of music teacher and student attitudes about music technology in and out of school

I examined what a music educator considered critical for students to achieve and maintain autonomous musicianship (Tobias, 2013) with the aid of current music technology, thereby seeking ways that their viewpoints did or did not blend with those of students in their classroom. I sought to record one teacher’s attitudes about music technology implementation in an Advanced Placement Music Theory classroom, a branch of the “secondary student population…traditionally excluded from music programs” (Tobias, 2010, p. 559). Next, I searched for ways that participating students’ uses of music technology revealed alignments or misalignments between their informal and formal learning environments. Finally, I explored the ways in which the teacher’s and students’ attitudes revealed a cooperative learning environment, defined according to pure and pragmatic constructivist theories of learning. Participants in this ethnographic case study comprised one teacher and nine students. Within one month, I interviewed students and their teacher, conducted classroom observations and collected several artifacts. Data analysis comprised a priori and open coding processes, as well as inductive, axial and selective application of codes to data. I organized data according to each research question and ensuing themes. Data analysis revealed the teacher’s attitudes about implementing technology into his curriculum and his students’ music technology use outside of school. Students discussed a variety of ways in which they work with music technology in and out of school, and some of these ways aligned with how their teacher facilitated their classroom routine. The classroom environment revealed constructivist qualities wherein students built their knowledge with music technology while making use of their informal learning experiences. Future research could look further into the extent to which students’ experiences play a role in the teacher’s music technology implementation in other non-band, choir, and orchestra classrooms and the role that a teacher’s assumptions play in that implementation

Successful Integration of Informal Learning in Engineering Education

Abstractâ?? Research suggests that an emerging environment of ubiquitous information technology affords seamless movement between formal learning, informal learning, and the workplace. This paper reviews research data from one successful teaching and learning methodology that leverages seamless movements between informal and formal learning in engineering education. The research is an ongoing pilot study at the University of Hartford using data from selected technical mathematics and communication electronics courses. The research data suggests that clearly defined academic jurisdictions have a positive correlation with successful integration of formal learning, informal learning, and the workplace. However, themes from the data also suggest that crossing academic boundaries involves more than technology issues and could raise the specter of unintended social-dramas. One theme suggests that, in a seamless environment without clearly defined academic jurisdictions, opportunities for collaboration could be misinterpreted as encroachments. To mitigate issues of competing jurisdictional interests this study employs Learner Agent Objects (LAO) individual portfolios. LAO portfolios are collections of evidence-based artifacts representing a learner's academic experience that independently moves with the learner as data network nodes between jurisdictions in engineering education and the workplace