Certainly my most favorite technological gadget is without a doubt my iPod.  I have the 4GB version of the iPod mini, which holds about 500 tunes and was full within about a month of my having purchased it.  I added genres for every music class that I teach, and I use it on almost a daily basis to demonstrate various musical styles and techniques.  What better way to teach my jazz students about how to swing an eighth note than to listen to a few bars of Louis Armstrong?  How better to teach them the proper tempo for Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone" than to play the introduction for them, with Ellington himself at the piano?  This is a truly awesome tool for our teaching, within the discipline of music education.  It's easy, fast, and relatively cheap, and provides an instant sample for our students to hear.  I have a four-speaker surround-sound system in our music room, to which I plug in my iPod each morning.  From that moment forward, I have the instant, push-of-a-button ability to sample for my students a huge range of the musical repetoire.

     Perhaps my least favorite gadget is the fragile, delicate, tempermental, unreliable, slow, poor-quality Hewlett-Packard computer printer that is attached to my office computer at the high school.  It has the unbelieveable power to raise my stress level and blood pressure on a 5-day-a-week basis, guaranteed - never fails.  At some point, I am certain that I will re-create the sledge hammer photocopier destruction scene from the movie "Office Space."  It's only a matter of time.  I suppose that I will have to tell the school that it simply blew up or caught fire or was stolen, and they will perhaps then feel inclined to replace it.  It's only a matter of time.

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     I enjoyed reading the blog entries from some of the folks in our class.  Below are my responses to three of them.

     First, I enjoyed the posting by Tomomi Ishihara regarding her issues and problems with computers, and her thought that Apple computers seem right now to be the simplest way to go.  I agree.  I am planning to trash my home PC pretty soon and get some kind of apple laptop to replace it.  It seems to me that Apple has constantly worked to improve its products to make them ever-more user friendly each and every time they come out with something new.  I like the idea of plugging something in and being able to get up and running seemingly at the push of a button, versus the hours of set-up time that my PC required when it was first purchased.  I have to admit that I'm somewhat of a technology amateur, in the sense that I only started using a computer for a substancial time when I started college in 1997.  About all I did on a computer prior to that was use to word processor to plunk-out little papers for my high school english classes.  I'm gettin' better, though.

     Secondly, I enjoyed Payam Larijani's blog about his dislike of the walkie-talkie feature cell phones that are all around us these days.  I cannot tell you how frustrated I am when I find myself in a crowded public area, waiting in line at the bank or standing in the lobby of a busy hotel, only to have to listen to some person shout into their little plastic phone receiver as if they were some sort of military commander sending troops into battle.  I have to chuckle to myself when, in my occasional trip to the mall, I find myself amongst various people walkie-talkie chatting with displaced members of their family or checking-up on their small children.  Somehow, it seems that parents gain some sense of safety in hearing their childrens' voices, even if they have no clue whatsoever when they are located or who they're with.  Perhaps we should think as a society about the issues of noise pollution that are ever-encroaching on us.  As a musician, I value silence as much as I value sound.  Silence is the clean canvas on which we paint musical tones.  Our modern world, both indoors and out, sometimes feels like we're painting our tones on a dirty newspaper instead of clean white canvas.  Too deep?  Nah.

     Lastly, although there are MANY good blog entries in this class and I'm only going to mention three, I enjoyed Seth Anderson's entry regarding Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Blink."  Seth told of how he doesn't necessarily trust the type of gut reactions and assumptions that Gladwell discussed.  This, because his masters degree thesis ended up being a series of somewhat suprising findings and leads.  I can see where this could be the case, and yet I find Gladwell's ideas interesting from the standpoint that as academic scholars we should find times when our "blink" type of reactions and instincts and intuitions can "red flag" certain decisions along the path and cause us to raise questions within our own research.  I think the individual ability of intuition that each of us possesses can be useful as we advance in our careers and lives.  Our research still needs to be guided by the time-honored methods of data collection, of course, but I feel that this research can be aided and partly-guided by our intuitive sense as well.  Seth has good thoughts on the topic.

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     The article that I chose to represent a significant contribution to my field of study is one that appeared in the February 1998 edition of the "Teaching Music" professional journal, and is entitled, "What it takes to be a music major."  It can be located on the website of the National Music Educators Conference, at http://www.menc.org/information/infoserv/whatittakes.html  I know that when I first encountered this article, I was in my sophomore year of study at the University of Arizona, as a secondary music education major.  I realized in reading this article that the preparation for the study of music which I had received on the high school level had been in many ways inadequate in preparing me for the field of study that I had chosen to pursue.  In fact, after reading the article I found myself feeling a bit inadequate in terms of being as prepared as some of my classmates at that time, and it left me wondering if when I became a music educator I would feel a sense of priority in preparing my music students for the "real world."  It seems to me that so often on the high school level, we simply seek to "teach to the test," within our modern age of standards-based education.  The arts, however, are in the more interesting situation of being exempt from this kind of standardized format simply attributed to the fact that no one has yet discovered an efficient way to test high school musicians on their musical abilities and knowledge in relation to the state and national standards for music education.  So, many of us, myself included at times, enjoy a carte blance attitude toward how and what we teach with regard to music.  We like to feel that what we are presenting to the high school musicians is meaningful, but does it PREPARE them for a career in music if they so choose to pursue one after high school?  What are we doing on the high school level to ensure that the future Maynard Fergusons and Ella Fitzgeralds of the world are getting what they need to be prepared?  The article mentioned above provides an overview of the skills and knowledge that must be acquired by a high school musician if they desire to be prepared for the collegiate study of music.  I have incorporated the ideals of this article into my daily teaching.  I know that over the course of my career only a handful of my high school students will go on to become professional musicians, but perhaps more than that will seek to pursue a career in music education or in the business world of music.  Thus, I feel an obligation to ensure that everyone leaves my classroom with a basic ability to be successful in the discipline, should they choose to do it. 

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1)     My reaction to the concept of rapid cognition, as presented in Malcolm Galdwell's, "Blink," is that of interest.  I fully understand the author's ideas, and I feel that it is a very real possibility that this kind of rapid cognition can be significant in our scholarly pursuits.  I acknowledge the idea that we as humans frequently encounter moments of rapid cognition in our daily lives, and yet it seems to me that we have in many cases been discouraged from trusting this kind of cognition within our own decision-making.  If one could hone one's skills in such a way as to master the use of this ability to filter decision-making between rapid and slow cognition, one might greatly increase his own effectiveness.  This is the kind of decision-making tool that could benefit people of all disciplines, and therefore I acknowledge the relationship of this text to our current transdisciplinary pursuits.  I feel that my activities as a music educator could be greatly influenced and that my productivity could be greatly increased if I could attain a level of comfort and reliability in filtering my daily teaching decisions between those of rapid and "regular" cognition.  While it seems to me that some decisions still require our time-honored scholarly approach, I also feel that this idea of rapid cognition really has a place in our disciplines.

2)     Although I admit that I enjoyed many of the stories contained within Gladwell's text, I felt that the opening story regarding the Getty kouros was perhaps one of the finest examples of how rapid congnition, when used in conjunction with the proper research, could have been of real use.  This story very simply summarized much of what my thoughts were regarding the book.

3)     I regret that I was not reading the text with an eye open for the specific detail of which CGU scholar was mentioned.  I did not feel that this was a major part of why I was asked to read the text.  I will attempt to look for more detail to this end, in our future readings.

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     Chapter 1, Questions 1-2

     I understand "old computing" to be in reference to the focus being on the physical machine itself, and on what it could do, versus the "new computing" idea of the user-focused interaction between the human and the machine.  The "old computing" used to be about what the maching itself could actually do, or hold within itself, whereas the "new computing" is much more user-based and more about how the machine can be used to achieve the specific needs of the user.

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     One of the central ideas of Kidder's book is that work will be done better at the grassroots level if it is interesting and challenging, and therefore in the design race between two computer companies the management style is actually much different than might be taught in the typical business school model.  The idea is that the computer engineers are working on a project that they enjoy and that it is a job in which they feel a strong sense of competition, but also a strong sense of satisfaction.  The engineers work at a grueling schedule primarily because they want to win the computer race and have the opportunity to design the next generation of computers.  The image of computer engineers in this book is different than we often find as their stereotype in society.  In Kidder's text, the engineers are imaginative individuals, and not the "nerdy" engineer types that we often envision.  This non-fiction text was written in 1981, and is written in Tracy Kidder's style as a thrill writer.   

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