CCSinM blog: http://bloggery.wlu.edu/ccsinmCourse description for UNIV203: http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/musics/UNIV203.html
more details and log: http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/musics/scholars.html
I'm always interested in intersections and overlaps, and in the unexpected and serendipitous. I've been interested in other peoples' musics since I was very young. I'm also a digital technoweenie, interested in all sorts of information and communication technologies for the teaching-and-learning uses they suggest and are entangled with. And I'm an anthropologist, and so have professional interests in the study of human variety. I'm also an improvising musician, fascinated especially with plucked-string instruments.
Throughout 30+ years of professoring I've been exploring alternatives to the traditional modalities of teaching and learning, in the hope of inspiring students to take responsibility for their own wetware, as a part of their own lifelong programs of adventures with Information. This course is the next episode in that odyssey.
Learning (and, for that matter, teaching...) ought to be fun, and it should be open-ended. It's not necessary or even desirable to specify "learning objectives" --the whole point of lifelong learning is to discover objectives as one learns, and that requires a level of trust in oneself and one's capabilities and capacity for learning, and trust in the seriousness of others.
A University Scholars course is the perfect venue for exploratory efforts built on interest and trust, at least in part because Scholars have already accepted the proposition of wetware responsibility.
I invite you to engage with the process of developing the directions of UNIV203, via reading and contributing to the CCSinM blog (http://bloggery.wlu.edu/ccsinm). Some of the mechanics are pretty clear: we'll meet 3-5 TuTh, there will be a lot of listening to and talking about musical examples chosen from my own hoard and other sources, we will explore many technologies for production and reproduction of music, and participants will produce Web-based projects exploring a musical genre or some other aspect of musics of the world. Just which musics will be included will depend partly on the interests expressed by participants, though I surely have agendas of my own and favorites that you shan't escape...
To a considerable degree (within the limits of available technologies), the course will be conducted in online fashion, using MP3s and readily available software. If you are in a position to request for Christmas or otherwise acquire an MP3 player (iPod, or whatever), this might be an appropriate time to get on that bandwagon.