The Role of Technology in Music Education: a Survey of Computer Usage in Teaching Music in Colleges of Education in The Volta Region, Ghana

The study sought to find out the role of computer technology in music education in Colleges of Education in the Volta Region of Ghana. It aimed at surveying the use of computer technology for teaching music and exploring the instructional prospects for computer technology usage in music in Colleges of Education. The study employed Rogers’ Diffusion Innovation theory and descriptive survey research method. Data was collected from the respondents using questionnaire, interview, and observation. The study revealed that even though about 90% of the music tutors have good academic qualification and over five years teaching experience, lack of competence in handling computer technology in teaching music among some music tutors and incoherent ICT initiatives hindered proper application of computer technology in the field of music education. It is however envisaged that increasing access and coherent computer technology initiatives will be paramount for the teaching of music in the Colleges of Education

A comparison of phone and grapheme-based spoken term detection

We propose grapheme-based sub-word units for spoken term detection (STD). Compared to phones, graphemes have a number of potential advantages. For out-of-vocabulary search terms, phone- based approaches must generate a pronunciation using letter-to-sound rules. Using graphemes obviates this potentially error-prone hard decision, shifting pronunciation modelling into the statistical models describing the observation space. In addition, long-span grapheme language models can be trained directly from large text corpora. We present experiments on Spanish and English data, comparing phone and grapheme-based STD. For Spanish, where phone and grapheme-based systems give similar transcription word error rates (WERs), grapheme-based STD significantly outperforms a phone- based approach. The converse is found for English, where the phone-based system outperforms a grapheme approach. However, we present additional analysis which suggests that phone-based STD performance levels may be achieved by a grapheme-based approach despite lower transcription accuracy, and that the two approaches may usefully be combined. We propose a number of directions for future development of these ideas, and suggest that if grapheme-based STD can match phone-based performance, the inherent flexibility in dealing with out-of-vocabulary terms makes this a desirable approach

Airborne Computer Technology

The development of airborne digital computer has been greatly influenced by rapid technological advances. This paper provides an overview of the present status and the direction of further evolution. It discusses the changes that are taking place in the areas of hardware, software and computer organization; and suggests a number of approaches towards a broadened usage of airborne computer to take advantage of its increasing capability and decreasing cost

Scaling the Digital Divide: Home Computer Technology and Student Achievement

Assesses the effect of access to home computers and broadband Internet on students' math and reading test scores and its potential to close the achievement gap for the disadvantaged. Considers the role of parental monitoring

Anthropological Dimension Computer Technology

людей, активно зайнятих навчальним процесом у загальноосвітній і вищій школі, на жаль, рідко знаходиться час і можливості для філософського осмислення перемін в освітній системі, що відбуваються в останнє десятиріччя. Дискусії щодо шляхів реформування освіти, щодо нових концепцій і парадигм ведуться, як правило, на наукових конференціях, в дослідницьких центрах і інститутах, в державних і "незалежних" фондах, в управлінських кабінетах міністерств і відомств. Педагоги, професорсько-викладацький склад, завідувачі кафедрами й декани факультетів затурбовані більше конкретними навчальними методиками й технологіями, діляться своїми досягненнями. Як виглядатиме загальний філософський підхід до значущих очікуваних, але по-своєму раптових і несподіваних змін у сфері інформаційної і духовної взаємодії в системі учитель-учень, свідками й очевидцями яких ми є?Article is devoted to such an actual problem of a modern pedagogical science as an anthropological component of computer technologies, ню It is considered the forms and the maintenance of processes of training and education of the new generations inherent in each stage of development of a society. It is characterised computer technology of training of the third generation as interdisciplinary process of a choice of the maintenance, forms and training methods. In the article it is defined perspective ways of an effective utilization of computer technologies during the processes of studying and scientific researc