Let's Play Ukulele: A Great Use of Dynamic Website Design
What does the Leisurely Historian do in his leisure time?
Well, given that I'm a grad student, there's not a whole lot leisure time, to be honest. I spend most of it feeling guilty that I'm not working or reading.
But over winter break, I finally broke down and did something I've been wanting to do for a while. I bought a ukulele. I love the sound, it's easy to play, it's compact, the small neck is easy for my somewhat stubby and ungraceful fingers.
Playing the ukulele isn't like playing guitar, though. There's not as many people who play it. I have two friends who even own one-- one lives over an hour away, in Baltimore, and the other lives in Texas. Lessons are out, too. When was the last time you looked at a bulletin board and saw someone advertising uke lessons?
So, being the nerd that I am, I turned to the internet. And let me tell you, the net is the friendliest place in the world for a fledgling ukulele player. The ukulele lessons on the newly-launched Ukulele Underground are amazingly well-done. Sheep Entertainment's Ukulele Chord Finder was a godsend. I especially enjoy that the flash program itself can be downloaded onto your computer, so you don't have to be online to remember what a D# 7sus4 looks like when you come across it in tablature.
There's the rub, though-- tablature. Most tabs you find online are for guitar, which has a different tuning. So my only recourse has been, when I'm not using the (limited, but still quite impressive in their variety) uke tabs on Ukulele Boogalloo, has been to find the guitar tabs, open up the chord finder, and figure it out from there.
Tom Smith, the author of The Let's Play Ukulele Songbook, has done ukulele novices everywhere a serious solid, though, with his new site Let's Play Ukulele. This is an inspired use of dynamic website design.
I haven't bothered to look under the hood, but from what I can tell, the site mostly works to compile things found elsewhere. Guitar tab sheets-- which can be found all over the web-- are brought in, and (again, from what I can tell) metadata as to the artist, title, and chords used in each song are attached. Image files of the appropriate ukulele fingering for each chord are appended to the top of the file. One can search by song or artist, of course, but that's too basic.
The really exciting search ability is to search based on the chords you know, so you can find songs that you can play immediately. The results are then ordered by the number of chords per song, so that the simplest songs come first. It's rather brilliant, a great tool for people who are trying to learn the instrument.
However, the most exciting part is where Tom goes one step further. On the logic that the easiest songs to play are the ones you know, and know well, the site gives you the ability to put in your last.fm username, and provide you automatically with songs you actually listen to-- again, in order of ease of play!
To give you some idea how this works, here's my results page.
It's certainly not "scholarly," but I think this is an excellent example of what digital pedagogy is really capable of. Even getting personalized lessons, I wouldn't be able to find a teacher who would be able to teach exclusively songs that are to my taste. The ability to search, to remix, to deal with large amounts of data, and to do so in a user-friendly, simple interface-- this is really an indication of how digital media can be used to individualize, to tailor what we learn and how, to engage students...
It's still in alpha, and it can be a little buggy, but this site is great, and really instructive. Even if you have no interest in playing the ukulele (though I'd argue you should reconsider that, as well) you should check it out, and play around with it a bit.
Digital Pedagogy Done Right!(tm)
If anyone hadn't gathered from my multiple cartographically-themed posts in the last couple weeks, I'm taking a course on History and Cartography this semester.
I want to take this opportunity to praise two of the websites we visited this week-- TypeBrewer and ColorBrewer. Both of these projects quite successfully combine several elements that seem to be essential to good use of new media for pedagogical ends.
For one thing, they're quite well-designed-- they're easy to use, the interface is straightforward and easy to use, and there's not much of a learning curve. Similarly, they do what new media does best-- they take something quite nuanced and complex and make it simple. The lessons you get experientially from toying with typography or colors in mapping, if you had to do this by trial-and-error, or even worse by hand, would be quite time-consuming and difficult, and you'd risk losing the forest to the trees.
The phrase I just used, "lessons you get experientially," leads me to the next thing I really liked about the sites. Neither was didactic or painfully "educational." I grew up with teachers for parents in the eighties, and I was exposed to my fair share of "educational toys." The ones that I learned the most from were the ones that put the emphasis on "toys" rather than "educational." The interface of these sites is quite pleasing, the "work" you do is quite entertaining... You PLAY with these websites, rather than being instructed by them. And even the most nose-to-the-grindstone, masochistic grad student would rather PLAY than WORK. The element of play encourages continued, protracted use, and thus a more nuanced understanding than a site that simply tells you that A is more effective than B but less successful than C. Moreover, these are somewhat intuitive, aesthetic "lessons," not simple right/wrong issues. The protracted play gives a better SENSE of best methods-- and sensibility is more important than dualistic right/wrong treatment of the issues.
Finally, by keeping the options limited and embracing the KISS principle, these projects could be put on the web as free flash tools. If the creators had made them too cumbersomely complex, or if they had been created in 1997, they probably would have ended up as expensive CD-ROMs that would have had less impact on fewer people...
Both pages are doing some of the most important things right when it comes to online pedagogy, and I was just blown away, honestly.
Myst is not a good video game.
First off, I had to post this when I found it: apparently, Nial Ferguson was so impressed by the Calm and the Storm that he went and got a job with them. It's not really a conflict of interests or anything, but I found it very interesting.
That said, I'm still not loving Myst. I'm not exactly an avid gamer, but I do enjoy some games in moderation. I'm not one of those anti-video game people. But I do not find Myst particularly enjoyable.
I'm still trying to beat it, though, as Prof. P promises that there's payoff at the end... I doubt it, though.
While reading the Gee article, it occurred to me that Gee has this almost platonic ideal of the "good video game," which he then contrasts with a bad classroom. But his thinking about what good video games are made me realize that Myst falls short.
Yeah, I said it: Myst is not a good video game.
I'm not going to belabor the point, but a couple of principles of "good video games" that Myst V (the version I'm playing) violates:
- Verbal information is seldom given "just in time," but rather well in advance and often in a different location.
- While there is a fish tank/sandbox in the form of the first couple rooms, it's essentially useless, except for understanding the very basics of navigation.
- This may just be me, but I know it's not me alone: the game isn't "pleasantly frustrating." It's just FRUSTRATING. The puzzles are very difficult, which may just be my unfamiliarity with the series, but they're also often quite hard to FIND. This leads to situations like wondering around for a long time trying to find something to DO (this game is so action-less I find it PAINFUL. I can accept a nonviolent video game, but a game where you can't even JUMP, get your feet wet in the ocean, or TALK TO ANYONE becomes pretty stagnant pretty quick), or, conversely, completing a puzzle without being aware that a puzzle had been there in the first place. (This latter situation occurred to me more than once.)
- The game doesn't go through "cycles of expertise," it just stays at a fairly stable level of difficulty, with the occasional easier problems sprinkled throughout. When I had to resort to a walk-through at one point, I realized that I was doing the game essentially backwards. And the thing of it was, some of the earlier stuff was far more challenging than some of the later.
Oh-- and just another desultory thought, here... Where do walk-throughs stand in terms of academic honesty and honor codes? Is it more like plagiarism, or more like a study guide?
Responses:
ARGs and the Classroom
I attended the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association last week. It was fortuitous, maybe, to have this week's James Paul Gee reading on the potential of video games as pedagogical tools, as I had the opportunity to attend several Internet and Video Games panels. One panel in particular made me reflect back to this course, and instead of just doing a gloss of the readings and the websites I've visited, I want to use my post to discuss the ideas I encountered in this panel.
J. James Bono, from the University of Pittsburgh, presented a paper called "Playing with Disaster: Serious Games, Alternate Realities,and Atlantic Storm." This paper brought up the pedagogical possibilities of something I'd never heard of-- Alternative Reality Games. These are a new development, a web-based type of game that is without a single platform-- the game is outside, it's in the minds of the participants, it's essentially research-as-gaming. Players find clues and put together remarkably difficult puzzles cooperatively, in a "game" the elements of which could be anywhere-- on any website, in the form of an SMS text message, even in that dreaded IRL world. For those of you unfamiliar, as I was, with the idea of Alternative Reality Games, or ARGs,as I was, I encourage you to check out the Wikipedia article linked above-- it gives a good sense of what ARGs are, and how they work, and it's pretty well-written for a Wikipedia article.
Another presenter, Angela Colvert, of the University of London, discussed a project she undertook with two primary school classes she taught: she assigned her fifth grade students to create an ARG, specifically targeted at the fourth grade students she also taught. While the project was, due to the students' ages, a rather simplistic project about an alligator who lives in the London Sewers, the project immediately suggested a whole set of ideas in my mind-- what if an assignment for grad students in CLIO was to design an ARG for students in an undergrad course, one based on an actual historical event or mystery? One class would acquire an invaluable set of skills based in information design, and the other could finding new approaches to research-- in an environment of a "game," which whether we're gamers or not, is often more fun and engrossing than reading a textbook and memorizing dates.
The final paper in the panel that related to this class-- I'm excluding a wonderful piece about the Japanese aesthetic principle of mono no aware in the Nintendo video game Pikmin 2, because it simply doesn't apply-- was by Terence Brunk of Columbia College. While his paper was actually an analysis of the narratological principles that can be seen in two "serious" online games-- the type of game that is created specifically with the social consciousness of its player in mind.
This paper really brought home the potential of ARGs as opposed to more traditional video games-- no matter how many options you present a player, video games are essentially goal-oriented and thus fairly linear. Eventually in the process of game design, you have to decide that the player must complete Level 1 before entering Level 2. While they're interactive, video games still have much the same linearity of text. And this is reinforced by their very nature: they're pre-produced, complete worlds. Add-ons like they have for the Sims or when they add new areas to an MMORPG are limited fixes, and must follow the rules previously established.
The role of the "puppet master," the person who essentially creates and maintains the ARG, often modifying the next step, puzzle, clue, or plant based on previous outcomes, is in many ways essentially very similar to the role of an excellent educator-- they challenge their subjects, altering results to outcomes, constantly pushing the problem further. I think it could be a really useful tool for this reason.