Memo on NYU-UCSC Collaboration
To: Professor John Gilbert and Ted Warburton
From: Dafu Lai
Subject: NYU-UCSC Collaboration
Time: February 25, 2005
I had been teaching music in my home country for 11 years before I came to NYU. I didn't have much experience of creative collaboration and performance in the past, but I did enjoy using modern technologies in my teaching a lot. About fifteen years ago in my first teaching, I used a cassette recorder a lot. For example I used it to play demo music for my students. Sometimes I also recorded my students' singing and played the record for them so that they can better understand what their voice like. Then they started to know controlling voice. That's the first sound technology I used for teaching. When electune came, I used it as an automatic accompany machine when teaching singing. I could simply make the electric organ record my playing before class, and then I made it replay automatically when needed. It's very convenient and helpful. Of course, my students always enjoyed singing very much with that extra "electric pianist" in class. In recent years when personal computer appeared, I started using Powerpoint, Media Player, Overtune (notation software) and the other computer technologies in teaching. All those technologies provide students a vivid scene and enhance teaching as well as learning a lot.
However, using modern technologies in teaching requires not only teacher's well-preparation, but also needs a clear awareness of unexpected accidents. That is, hardware, software or electricity problems could happen easily. So every time when we want to use non-traditional teaching approaches (such as computer technologies) in teaching, we have to prepare traditional teaching approaches at the same time in case of those accidents. Otherwise, the class time could be killed very quickly when testing or adjusting equipments.
Correspondence course was the first non-traditional education I involved. I used to teach in a remote village which was far away from capital city of my province. So I couldn't commute to the university in the city every day. Instead, I attended a degree correspondence study in Music Department of Fujian Normal University. We met twice an academic year for intensive training. The training lasted four weeks during summer and two weeks during winter break. Beside intensive trainings, we got lots of hand-outs, reference books and types for at-home-study. Usually we sent assignments and asked questions via post mail. (There was no email at that time.) In addition, we had a course magazine which was issued once two months. We also exchanged ideas, discussed and asked questions there. Though I didn't study on campus as full time students at that time, I still learned a lot from that correspondence course.
Originally, I was curious about how we connect to California people in class. I thought it's a good opportunity to make new friends, exchange information to the other side and learn things outside our campus. However, I found there were more interesting things than I expected now. For example, I can not only develop my multimedia skills, but also learn to create or develop a distance collaborative project with my colleagues. The most important thing is not the project itself, but the experience and sequence of the collaboration. As and old saying goes: Two heads are better than one. --- We are learning to better cooperate with fellow partners in class and out side, in our field as well as the other fields.
I think understanding could be a difficult part of this course collaboration. As we know, there are several groups in our class: sound team, dancing tram and musician team. Different groups have different interpretation tendency to the same problem. So does individual. As a matter of fact, a successful collaboration project needs all participates' agreement of the center idea. So it's necessary to maintain a better understanding among team members. Also, communication could be another problem especially for partners from two campuses. Though we can see and talk each other through internet in class, it's less possible to access this exchange after class. So I suggest we have more individual exchange via email, phone call, online forum or visiting individual websites each other after class.
The main question I have about distance education is time limitation. The performance day is May 5, but I still have little idea about the final project now. How we (musician team) contribute to our project? Actually, I don't know what we shall do at the next step. I wish we have a clear idea about our collaborative project soon. I know improvise collaboration is great, but we still need to prepare in order to reach a cooperation successfully.