Yesterday, day two, was another great day hear at DML. I had the pleasure of having lunch with another music educator I’ve met here, Chris Amos. Chris is the Director of Educational Media and Technology for Carnegie Hall in New York City. Needless to say, this was a great opportunity for me as this sector of music Ed (school and community outreach for performing arts presenters) is something I would potentially be very interested in after graduation. Chris has a great job where he gets to work on all of this music and performing arts outreach work and try and make it as innovative for students as possible. His main project is a social network managed by Carnegie Hall called Musical Exchange. In musical exchange, students ages 13-25 can register and complete educational modules within specific interest groups (ex. Classical, Musical Theater, Song Writing, Hip Hop. Etc). For each module, participants are asked to upload and showcase videos or recordings of their work. The really powerful thing about this model is two fold. For one, these students are actively commenting and critiquing each other’s work in very powerful ways. We know that when students work is “out there” they take more ownership and the quality increases. These students are all over the world and in some cases chip away in these groups on their own and in some cases are asked to upload for feedback by private instructors. This all gets at the passion based learning…and boy are these kids passionate. I know I plan to have some of my private students get some work up there! The other extremely powerful component of the network is that for each interest group, Carnegie Hall has teaching artists that are outside professionals and contribute instruction (the modules) and feedback to the students work they present. For example, the teaching artist for Musical Theater is Leslie Stifelman (music director and conductor for Chicago on Broadway).
One last interesting component that the folks at Carnegie Hall are implementing through the network is group listening for these students. The Hall live streams select performances and hosts live chat (back channels) for the students and teaching artists as they listen to the live performance.
I think this project has such great potential and I can’t wait to see it continue to grow!!