Introducing the 2024 #SCMTME and MC1 Extension cohorts

Any of you who have been reading my blog this century will know that I’m a big fan of getting students to publicly blog about their project work, and to develop portfolios and professional websites online. There’s a research backing behind this, by the way. If you’re interested in that, I’ve posted three paragraphs from one of my own publications below.

But I’m not starting with that, because I want to share links to my students’ work, first. This work is from two classes – first MUED4002 Technology in Music Education, a course you may well be familiar with, in which students undertake a project of their own design on any aspect of technology in music education.

The second course is an Extension course for double stream music candidates (postgraduates who are studying to be music teachers with no second teaching area, and so get double the music pedagogy training) in the Master of Teaching (Secondary). This course allows them to explore one of the specialisations that fit into the undergraduate degree but do not fit into the postgraduate one (including Jazz in music education, Composition in music education, and Popular Music Studies), and then extends them by getting them to reimagine these subjects with a technology-based, 21st century-bent, if music education didn’t already have a history. Kuhn and Hein suggest it would look more like an art class, and we use their fabulous book Electronic Music School to give us activities to do, assessment rubrics, and then to plan out our own creative ideas.

So, the students blog about what happens in classes, or on themes that arise from the classes and (mostly optional) readings, and then they plan a project, and make a thing. This year we are coordinating with Music EDNet to present some of the projects at the internationally streamed DAYTiME (a day of technology in music education) on Friday 14th June. So, check out student work by clicking on their links, below!

Technology in Music Education cohort

Music Curriculum 1 Extension cohort

Encouraging Critical Thinking (CT) in school teachers and pre-service educators through public blogging, from my own published research.

There is convincing evidence that reflective public blogging provides excellent stimulus for CT. As Woo and Wang (2009) put it, “Web 2.0 tools such as weblogs and discussion forums have the potential to promote students’ critical thinking, for they allow students to publish information to a broader audience and hence students have to take more responsibility and think further before they post” (p. 541). In their own review of the literature, Woo and Wang point to two decades of research, beginning with the analytical model they adopt (Newman, Webb, & Cochrane, 1995) and ending with more recent analyses of critical thinking in asynchronous discussion forums (Marra, Moore, & Klimczak, 2004; Perkins & Murphy, 2006), both of which demonstrate evidence of CT in multiple studies.

Giarré and Jaccheri (2008) found that asking students to blog a research project publicly stimulated high levels of student engagement even after the course was over. Interestingly, they also found that students preferred to communicate as a group in a private forum. Using a similar approach, the MOOC supported discussion privately through the Coursera system, while the assignment blogs were public-facing. Turvey and Heyler (2017) demonstrated similar success when asking pre-service teachers to blog about their learning and professional experiences, explaining that by “giving voice to the personal in a public arena, there is the opportunity for collaboration in the exchange of ideas and experience; a favourable condition for the generation and building of professional knowledge and understanding” (p. 43).

Freeman and Brett (2012) explored issues affecting frequency of blogging in a postgraduate distance learning course and found that scaffolded prompts were successful in creating more timely and reflective writing, which in turn made the experience closer to that of an authentic blogger, defined as “writing regularly about ideas that are personally meaningful” (p. 1040). Zandi, Thang, and Krish (2014) investigated the impact of introducing public blogging to practicing educators and found that it had “a positive effect on teacher learning within a community of practice” (p. 530).

Humberstone, J. H. B., Zhao, C., & Liu, D. (2020). Nurturing vulnerability to develop pedagogical change through MOOC participation and public blogging. In J. Waldron, S. Horsley, & K. K. Veblen (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (pp. 590–617). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190660772.013.35