More salsa-dancing social science

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Continuing with Salsa Dancing Into The Social Sciences by Kristin Luker. See the first part of the discussion here.

Salsa Dancing Into The Social Sciences

Canonical sociologists usually have well-bounded sets of questions, and answer them using well-bounded sets of theories and previous findings. Qualitative researchers have questions that emerge out of theoretical and purposive open-ended research. Luker describes the case that “chooses you,” or “the one that you sample yourself into.” You want to ask: What is this a case of? and: How do you expand it to another level of generality?

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Measurement in games for learning research

Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass

Flow

Kiili, K., &; Lainema, T. (2008). Foundation for Measuring Engagement in Educational Games. J of Interactive Learning Research, 19(3), 469–488.

The authors’ purpose here is to assess flow in educational games, to “operationalize the dimensions of the flow experience.” A flow state involves deep concentration, time distortion, autotelic (self-motivating) experience, a loss of self-consciousness, and a sense of loss of control.

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The role of culture in interpretive inquiry

Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson

Geertz, C. “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture.” In The Interpretation Of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30, 1973

Clifford Geertz - The Interpretation of Cultures

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The Craft of Research and Salsa Dancing

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

The Craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph Williams is a sober and traditional guide to humanities scholarship.

The Craft of Research

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Introduction to Research on Games and Simulations

Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass

In this post I’m summarizing some writing about the foundations of research on games for learning. It’s a dry topic, so to enliven it I’ve included a bunch of screencaps from Mega Man 2. They have nothing to do with anything, but they look cool.

Mega Man 2 giant fish

Plass, J.L., Homer, B.D., & Kinzer, C. (2015). Foundations of Game-based Learning. Special Issue on Game-based Learning, Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 258–283.

What is a game exactly? One definition: “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen & Zimmerman 2004, 80). Gamification is the grafting of points and stars onto existing tasks, like completing your boring homework. By contrast, game-based learning is more like Logical Journey of the Zoombinis – organically placing learning activities into a conflict structure to make them interesting and engaging.

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Affordances and Constraints

Note-taking for User Experience Design with June Ahn

Don Norman discusses affordances and constraints in The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter Four: Knowing What To Do.

Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things

User experience design is easy in situations where there’s only one thing that the user can possibly do. But as the possibilities multiply, so do the challenges. We can deal with new things using information from our prior experiences, or by being instructed. The best-designed things include the instructions for their own use, like video games whose first level act as tutorials, or doors with handles that communicate how you should operate them by their shape and placement.

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Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam”

One of my favorite guest verses in all of hip-hop is the one that Chance The Rapper does on Kanye West’s beautiful “Ultralight Beam.”

The song is built around an eight bar loop. (See this post for an analysis of the chord progression.) Chance’s verse goes through the loop five times, for a total of forty bars. It’s not at all typical for a rap song to include a one and a half minute guest verse–it’s almost enough material to make a whole separate song. By ceding so much space in his album opener, Kanye has given Chance the strongest endorsement possible, and Chance makes the most of his moment.

Chance The Rapper

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Freedom ’90

Since George Michael died, I’ve been enjoying all of his hits, but none of them more than this one. Listening to it now, it’s painfully obvious how much it’s about George Michael’s struggles with his sexual orientation. I wonder whether he was being deliberately coy in the lyrics, or if he just wasn’t yet fully in touch with his identity. Being gay in the eighties must have been a nightmare.

This is the funkiest song that George Michael ever wrote, which is saying something. Was he the funkiest white British guy in history? Quite possibly.  Continue reading “Freedom ’90”

Careless Whisper

 The infamous saxophone riff in “Careless Whisper” is one of the most infectious earworms in musical history. Love it or hate it, there is no getting it out of your head. In honor of the late George Michael, let’s take a look at what makes it work.
careless-whisper-midi

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Cultural hegemony in music education

Music education in American colleges and universities focuses almost entirely on the traditions of Western European aristocrats during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known conventionally as “common practice music.” This focus implies that upper-class European-descended musical tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance is normative. In this paper, I discuss theoretical notions of pedagogical authority as a form of power. I then examine a music textbook catalog from a prestigious academic press in order to gain insight into the hegemonic culture of classical music, as well as the emerging challenges to that culture.

Biz

American musical culture is a riotous blend of styles and genres. However, there is a unifying core to nearly all of our popular music, and much “art” music as well: the loop-centric, improvisational, dance-oriented traditions of the African diaspora. Mcclary (2000) argues that the “various trickles” of the past hundred years of American music collect into “a mighty river” following a channel cut by the blues (32). Yet it is possible to complete a music degree at most American universities without ever coming into contact with the blues, or anything related to it. The music academy’s near-exclusive focus on Western classical tradition places it strikingly at odds with the broader culture. We need to ask what might be the ideological motivation for perpetuating the divide.

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