Pauline Sameshima's research and art-making center on looking at both the official and the hidden curriculum. She is interested in learning system designs, technology integration, collaborative and creative scholarship, eco-responsive pedagogies, and alternative forms of knowledge production and acknowledgment.
Pauline teaches math methods for elementary teachers, arts integration, and curriculum theory. She is an exhibiting multi-media artist, lyricist, and designer. Her artwork has been included in three editions of Night of Artists Biographies and Works, a Canadian publication archived at the National Gallery of Canada. She combines her professional interests with her experience teaching elementary public school for 17 years with five years in administration.
Recent accomplishments
Sameshima, P., Vandermause, R., & Chalmers, S (with Gabriel). (in press). Climbing the ladder with Gabriel: Poetic inquiry with a methamphetamine addict in recovery. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Prendergast, M., Leggo, C., & Sameshima, P. (Eds.). (in press). Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Sameshima, P. (2008). Letters to a new teacher: A curriculum of embodied aesthetic awareness. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(2), 29-44.
Sameshima, P. (2008). AutoethnoGRAPHIC relationality through paradox, parallax, and metaphor. In S. Springgay, R. L. Irwin, C. Leggo & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. 45-56). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Andrew R. Brown in the Research Manager for the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), teaches music and sound at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and coordinates the Computational Arts Research Group at QUT. His expertise is in technologies that support creativity and learning, computational music and art, and the philosophy of technology. His current research focuses on the aesthetics of computational processes and adaptive music for interactive entertainment. He is an active computer musician, computational artist, and a builder of software tools that support creativity.
Joe has been immersed in the software world for 30 years, and is also an active composer and pianist. Most recently VP of Engineering at the innovative e-commerce company Allurent, Joe was also Chief Architect at startup Ruckus Networks, and as a Senior Architect at ATG he led the development of a number of pioneering software products. Joe is a frequent and sought-after speaker at conferences on the Adobe Flash and Flex platforms and has contributed a substantial number of open-source projects to the Flex development community, ranging from pattern-based application frameworks to code coverage tools. Back in the misty dawn of time, he studied at New England Conservatory of Music.
Noteflight, LLC is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is dedicated to reinventing the way that people create, share and use written music. Our product doesn't merely improve on other music notation software: it lets written music take advantage of the full power of the web as we know it today. Noteflight is a powerful full-featured application to edit, display and play back music notation in a standard web browser, integrated in an online library of musical scores that anyone can publish, link to, or embed.
Earlier this month Evan Tobias posted about Noteflight, a new online flash-based notation application available at http://www.noteflight.com/. Over the past few weeks I have been exploring this software with college students in my Technology in Music Education course and with high school students enrolled in a beginning piano class at Lowell High School (LHS). Those of you who know me know how apprehensive I am when it comes to using notation software with students in general music or other technology classes in K-12 schools. Most of my concern centers around the common conflation of "notation software" with "composing software." All too often I see teachers using notation software as a technological endpoint rather than as a means to the musical end of live performance. However, Noteflight is not your ordinary notation software.
What interests me about Noteflight is not the notation component. Instead, it is in the social tools that surround the notation engine. When you sign up at Noteflight.com (currently free) you create personal profile, just like you would at a social networking site like Facebook, MySpace or custom sites created at Ning.com. Once signed in, you can create a new score, view existing scores, or scores created by other users.
Built in to the web application is the ability to share your scores with other users. These scores can be easily embedded just like a YouTube video in a class website. The embedded score can be played back by clicking on the play button and additional interactive functions are being planned which could be helpful in guided listening activities. Coming from a constructivist perspective, this functionality enables teachers to give students the opportunity to share their musical understanding in interactive ways within and beyond class time. For example, a band director could post a Noteflight score without added articulation. Students could then be assigned to add their own articulations to the score. During the next class, the students and director could choose a few scores to play through. This approach gives students the opportunity to make creative articulation decisions as composers, rather than traditionally learning it through listening and performing.
A variation on this assignment could be to post an audio file of a musical line performed with different articulations. Below the audio file, a director could post the notation for that performance, but again without articulation added. As an assessment, students could then open the score and add articulations that in their mind matched the recorded performance.
Right now, there are some limitations to accomplishing this, but I've been assured by Joe Berkovitz, CEO of Noteflight, that these functions are currently in development.
This screenshot shows the "version" function for Noteflight. As you work on a score in Noteflight, it periodically saves a snapshot of your piece and gives you access to it as a different "Version." If you open your score up to be added to by others, their versions show up in this box as well. At any point you can go back (revert) to a prior version. This is a cool function, not only because you can go back, but as a window into your students' compositional processes. Though not a full account of their process, these snapshots can provide an opportunity to have discussions with your students about the changes they made in their composition and are great starting points for assessment.
Here's a short piece composed by students of Tony Beatrice, UML graduate student in music education as part of an art-infused composing project:
Right now, the interactivity is limited to simple whole piece playback and playback within measures (click above the measure). Soon, functions will be added that will enable the composer to add additional interactivity through scripting. Very cool. :)
My students and Noteflight
My college students have been using Noteflight with beginning piano students at Lowell High School (LHS) for the past few weeks. Students in my class created incomplete duets to be co-composed and performed with their partner students at LHS. The music teacher at LHS has for the most part have been using Alfred's Adult Beginner Piano book to structure the curriculum. My college students wanted to add a composing/creativity aspect to the lessons. To do this, they created simple piano scores with either a chord progression in the bass clef or a melody in the treble clef (or some combination of the two) as a compositional frame to help scaffold the LHS students. Because the scores are online and viewable by the LHS students and my college students, both can practice alone and make edits to their duet scores. Tomorrow, they will meet again in person for a final run through and performance for the class. I'll post some of the pieces and performances here soon.
Because Noteflight is an online application, the potential for collaborative work and learning with other students is high. I'm in the middle of planning a distance composing project with another school later in the term through Noteflight. Facilitated by a custom Ning.com social network, students at LHS will notate compositions in Noteflight and share them with other students at a distance site. Ning will enable them to post their files and provide peer comment and critique. This use is inspired in part by the work at the Vermont MIDI Project, but instead centers on the students as providers of compositional critique and feedback, rather than professional composers.
I'm very excited to see how this technology develops. If you are interested in collaborative projects using Noteflight with your students, drop me an email.
Drawing on observation and interview data collected from a case study of learning and teaching in a music technology lab, this article focuses on the nature of feedback and compositional intent during a soundtrack composing experience as viewed through the lived experiences of a teacher (Mary), a student composer (Ellen) and Ellen's peers. Tensions embedded in their shared experiences are analyzed for insights that may help other teachers of music composition in schools provide more successful feedback through valuing and responding to the student's musical agency and compositional intent. These insights illustrate the complex interplay among teacher feedback, learner agency and students' compositional intent, with particular attention to implications aimed at helping teachers to facilitate and design composing experiences in more inclusive ways.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Connecting Computer Science and Music Students to the Benefit of Both
Gena Greher--University of Massachusetts, Lowell Jesse Heines--University of Massachusetts, Lowell
We present a hands-on, interdisciplinary project designed to help music education students think about how novices learn new symbol systems. The students design a musical instrument from a typical household object and create a musical composition for it. They then devise a notation system that others can understand well enough to perform their composition with little to no verbal or written direction. Given this notation system, computer science students create programs that implement it. The two groups of students interact during the "hand off" and when music students "try out" the programs developed by the computer science students. Both groups of students benefit from learning to communicate with others whose backgrounds differ significantly from their own and from understanding what it really takes to create a notation system and a computer program that can be used by people who don't share their perspective.
Social Networking as Professional Development Gena Greher (University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
Conversations with recent graduates from our program revealed that while they don’t regret their career choice, they often feel isolated from their music education peers and overwhelmed by all of the administrative issues they need to deal with in addition to their teaching duties. Several alumni who are approaching the three year mark are starting to question what the future holds for them and are relieved to learn that there is research confirming that what they are feeling is actually normal. After last year’s pre-conference session, I created Ning networks for some of my partnership projects and found Ning’s many features useful. Setting up a discussion forum for these new teachers would help them to stay in touch, meet colleagues from other years, share ideas, discuss concerns, and vent frustrations. It is hoped that the participants will find the peer support that is often missing for music teachers who are often the sole music practitioners in their buildings.
Using Ning.com to Support and Extend Music Learning Alex Ruthmann (University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
This hands-on session will focus on using NING to support college music courses. Beginning with an overview of NING sites I have co-developed with my students over the past year, participants will experience what it is like to interact with each other in a NING-moderated course. Specifically, strategies designed to foster communities of practice within music technology, music education, and professional development settings will be shared.
Attendees will have the opportunity to:
Create their own NING site for a course, ensemble, outreach or applied studio setting Learn how to make their NING site public or private Learn how to integrate video, audio, blogs and discussion fora Bring in RSS/Twitter feeds & content to enhance their course Ask lots of questions!
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