Climbing the Tree and playing together
This topic on the ONL-page posed a question on how to get people to recognize the value of becoming part of a learning community and collaborate with their peers in a way that makes use of all the different competencies that group members bring into the work. After our meetings we decided that the question we were going to ask was: How do we get from cooperation to collaboration?
Our presentation developed into two metaphors, The Tree and the Improvisational band.
Regarding the band/music metaphor.
This spring due to the pandemic, I had to quickly figure out how to teach all of my ensembles-classes online instead of the usual synchronous rehearsals/classes. Like I wrote in our group-presentation, In music, whether you are a student or a working pop/rock/jazz -musician there are almost always collaborative elements involved. Different goals and styles of music call for different methods of combined effort. So, which types of combined effort are possible with todays technology? One thing is certain: If everything was perfect with regards to students having their instruments/microphones connected with fantastic sound online, a superfast connection, they were in the best mood of their lives, the birds were singing and the stars and planets were aligned….there is still one hurdle to overcome and that hurdle is latency. If the latency of sound between the students is more than around 10-20 milliseconds, it will be almost impossible for the students to play together in sync with each other. In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj6Ij1Oxe1s they present the problems associated with playing music together online and also calculate how much latency there would be if information travelled at the speed of light. They show that if two musicians, one in NYC and one in Hawaii tried to play music together the latency would be 52ms. Latency is the hurdle that stands in my way right now from trying synchronous ensemble-classes.
When preparing for meeting 2 in Topic 3 I read this in one of the papers I found:
Student engagement through emotional interaction is directly related to academic success, whereas emotionally unresponsive learning environments affect academic performance (Reyes et al., 2012). Student-student emotional support embraced through interaction is necessary to build a sense of community leading to cooperation, commitment, individual accountability and satisfaction, which are requisites to collaborative learning (Kreijns et al., 2003; Zhan, 2008).
For students and musicians to be able to successfully collaborate, first and foremost they need to be able to feed of each other, they need to trust in each others abilities to contribute.
In the music part of the presentation we used two different scenarios:
Cooperation
An example of cooperation in music could be a recording-session in a studio environment where the musicians/students are handed sheet music, a producer calls the shots regarding the arrangement and the musicians record their parts to a clicktrack/metronome.
The different instruments can be (and in these types of situations often are) recorded separately, though the end result will be the fusion of the individual performances.
Collaboration
For collaboration to take place in an improvisational setting e.g. a Jazz-trio, the musicians choices and actions have to be intuitive. They need to connect musically and so they need to have knowledge about each others background, musical history, weak points/strong points, how they tend to phrase etc. but also about their different personalities.
There are of course many more ways to collaborate/cooperate in music, e.g. writing music together by playing and sharing ideas, passages, chords, parts, lyrics etc. to each other and making songs this way. That’s for another paper/presentation.
The end result for our PBL-group ended up according to me to be the most cooperative work we have done so far, and for me personally these two weeks got me thinking about how to better collaborate in different situations in my regular work. I recently stumbled across Susan A Wheelan´s “creating effective teams”. She divides the progress of a group into four stages:
- Dependency & Inclusion
- Counter-dependency & fight
- Trust & structure
- Work & productivity
When I look at what our PBL-group has achieved so far I think we are now somewhere in between stage 3 and 4 and I think it shows in our work. Stages 1 and 2 weren’t all that dramatic for us and the results from topics 1 and 2 were ok, but when the group started to work more collaboratively on topic 3, it changed everything.
On towards Topic 4
Reference list
Authors of the Articles i read:
Reyes et al., 2012,
Kreijns et al., 2003; Zhan, 2008
Wheeler, 2005
