Gibber is a creative coding environment for the browser designed for live coding performance and education. It emphasizes a simple notation, a strong audio-visual feature set, immediate feedback, and social collaboration. We describe the use of Gibber and its supporting libraries in a variety of educational settings, from work with a summer camp for middle-school girls to university electroacoustic ensembles. We also describe early results designing a new environment, called Braid, for live coding browser-based digital musical instruments (DMIs) that is informed by our teaching experiences.

Writing To Learn (WTL) is a promising pedagogical approach by which students can process scientific content. However, much remains unsettled regarding WTL's likely mechanisms of action and corresponding best practices, particularly for nontraditional forms of writing, such as the writing of song lyrics about disciplinary content. Here we present pilot data suggesting that, when given music assignments, some anatomy and physiology students are resistant to what we term "Songwriting To Learn" (STL), while others see its potential as a catalyst for learning. We offer recommendations on implementing STL in science courses. Our emphasis is on facilitating and tracking the learning that occurs during the song-writing process, rather than focusing on the final song. Our key recommendations are encapsulated in a template for documenting this along-the-way learning and, in doing so, guiding students through science song-writing assignments that might otherwise seem difficult. We welcome feedback on this template.

No abstract

One of the most popular new media platforms for the proliferation and distribution of ideas related to Technology, Entertainment, and Design is produced in the form of TED Talks.  For the independent TED event—designated by the x—TEDxLSU, three media artists developed a poetry performance web app, Diamonds in Dystopia, which applies advanced coding techniques to aggregate TED Talk transcripts as found text to generate new stanzas using a found text and Markov chains creative process, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. This addition pushes the boundaries of the TED Talk by adding another exciting and popular form of new media, interactivity, to the mixture of mediums. Performance-scaled interactivity, specifically using mobile devices in an audience comprised of hundreds of users swaps the individualized information dissemination system and turns it into one capable of creative output or collaboration. The collaborative text contributed by the audience in Diamonds in Dystopia further engages information dissemination because the user’s interaction enables a parallel creative bond to form between the audience experience and the performing poet, in terms of the text methodology employed. By picking or clicking on the individual word selections of a seed poem that resonate with them, audience members create Markov chain reactions that creatively recombine and datamine a database of over 2,500 TED Talks to send a flurry of improvisational stanzas to the poet, which he then improvises into the poem on stage, creating and archiving an event-specific version of the poem and performance.

No abstract