Active Learning

Here’s an interesting theory on how to introduce a new element to higher education. Why not have an impromptu Lecture Musical? Oh, and no need to let the lecturer know in advance.

The Wizard of Oz

On Monday night Lotte and I had the pleasure of seeing the kids involved in the Mt Scopus production of The Wizard of Oz perform a number we had choreographed for them while Lotte was on placement as a student-teacher. The kids were really terrific. About 30 of them performed The Jitterbug, which is a song that never appeard in the film. It’s a shame because it’s actually a really swinging number. We did track down some shaky footage of the cast of the film rehearsing it before it was dropped (it’s an extra on one of the DVDs). The challenges in choregraphing it were many: the kids varied greatly in their age and dance experience, and the number was quite long and very high energy. We needed to come up with a way for the stronger students to do some “real LindyHop” stuff without requiring too much of them, and we only had 2 sessions to teach them! Lotte did almost all of the work, of course. I just helped with the planning and choreography. We split them up into smaller groups and gave each group a short sequence. There was a longer sequence that they all did as a chorus, and then the smaller groups trade phrases, stealing the spotlight briefly. The principle actors (pictured) all needed small dance parts of their own that were not too challenging because they were singing at the same time with headmics.

The way it turned out was even better than we’d imagined, dance-wise. The kids completely nailed it, really. Musically it was not so great. Instead of using the recorded track as they had said, they decided to play the music live. That would have been a big ask for an experienced swing band, but for the student band it was a nightmare and they didn’t pull it off. To the kids’ credit they danced it all as though the music was spot on, and they got away with it. Thankfully there was a reprise at the end and one of the two numbers they did was The Jitterbug. It worked better musically the second time through, and it showed. After the show the kids came up to us and told Lotte that they’d seen her watching and dancing away in her seat. They went back to their friends and said “Lotte’s here! Now we really have to dance well!!”. It was so cute.

A Very Good Day

All in all I’ve decided that today was a Very Good Day. For one reason or another I’ve been very productive at work this week and today was no exception. It’s always a good feeling when you know you’re really on top of things at work. Sometimes coming to work can be a drudgery, but this week I seem have quite a lot to do and that motivates me. So I’ve been turning out work by the bucketloads.

Tonight was dedicated as Tax Night, due to the fact that I have an appointment on Friday with my Accountant to put in my (now very overdue) tax returns for the past two years! Whenever I tell people about this I feel really guilty. Accountijng is my least favourite thing to do in the world. But the funny thing is just about everyone says that they get behind on their taxes pretty often too. That always makes me feel a bit better!

Strange that I hate doing accounts but I’m really enjoying the accounting project I’m doing with Business Information Systems. I guess it’s just teaching people how to do accounts, not actually doing it myself. Even better I get to try to think up ways to make it more interesting for them, which has got to be a benefit to society, don’t you think?

So anyway the other good thing about today was that I got my tax done. At least, all I need to do before seeing the Accountant. Yeehar.

As if that wasn’t enough, just an hour or so I got an email from someone who was organising the gradual repayment of a long overdue sum of money — sponsorship money that fell through — for an event in 2003! I’ve been waiting a long time for this to happen and it finally looks like it will. This means we may be able to keep up with uni fees without going a long way into debt after all. Phew.

OK, I have an early start and I should be in bed. I just thought I would post something trivial instead of a huge long super-pretend-seriou s thing about DJing or something. I’ve noticed nobody comments on the long boring blog entries!

Oz iTMS in June?

The Mac rumour sites have carried plenty of stories about it before, but recently the stories about an Australian iTunes Music Store have been coming from other sources as well. I always wonder how these stories get started, because in my experience even Apple employees are kept in the dark until the last minute these days. The tantalising nugget of info in the most recent story that may give a clue is that Apple has supposedly been booking space in music magazines. I suppose someone might be putting 2 and 2 together, but there’s always a chance they are coming up with 5. A mid-June launch would put the Oz iTMS after WWDC, which seems likely to me — but why not announce it at WWDC? Maybe they’d prefer to time it with some local event for maximum coverage. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve actually been using iTMS since it was announced, with the help of a friend stateside. I pay him $US20 with PayPal and he lets me buy another 20 songs. I realise I’m going to have a problem when it comes to exercising my right to use these tunes into the future (specifically when I register for iTMS Oz) but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. This is another reason why DRM generally sucks — we get told we can’t buy things based on geography because that suits companies, not individuals. Why should we not get the right to use something in different countries — after all even nation-states recognise that people move for legitimate reasons. Multinationals generally don’t have to answer to moral questions, however. There’s no authority big enough to make them.

More on Adair: creativity

The previous entry rabbiting on about Adair’s work on teamwork was getting a bit long and I decided this deserved its own topic. Lately I have been thinking more about the creative process, mostly with respect to CRR. My own thinking on creativity is very much in line with what Adair has to say about creativity as well:

The seven habits of successful creative thinkers are:

1. Thinking outside the apparent confines of the problem/situation
2. Welcoming chance intrusions
3. Listening to your depth mind (the unconscious mind)
4. Suspending judgement
5. Using the stepping stones of analogy
6. Tolerating ambiguity
7. Banking all ideas from all sources

There are number of obstacles which inhibit creativity. The seven main ones are:

1. Negativity
2. Fear of failure
3. Lack of quality thinking time
4. Over-conformance with rules and regulations
5. Making assumptions
6. Applying too much logic
7. Thinking you are not creative

© John Adair

This applies directly to the things we’ve been talking over in our troupe meetings lately — for instance that we feel like we want to expose ourself to new influences and open up our ideas. The one about conformance to rules and regulations is a bugbear of mine — a couple of troupe members insisted recently that we all write up lesson plans prior to our workshops. It resulted in a lot of stress for some people and then after a lot of people reluctantly complied, one of the people who was insisting on written plans didn’t even do one themself. It’s this kind of thing that really gets in the way of building up teams too I think. But it certainly dampened creativity in many ways.

“Tolerating ambiguity” is a really concise way of saying something I have been thinking about. It’s not important to find the right way to do everything. For a dance troupe as much as any other group endeavour, the process is often just as important, if not more important, than the product. Only accepting one way of doing things is tempting fate.

What I’ve learnt about teamwork

Through my involvement in project management in my job, being involved in organising MLX, and in helping to start a dance troupe, I’ve given a fair bit of thought to the area of teamwork. Sometime during 2004 I was exposed to the ideas of the British leadership and management expert John Adair. Now, I am normally downright hostile when someone presents me with a model of management doublspeak. Just about everything I see on the topic makes me feel physically ill. So I was surprised when I started reading his stuff and finding practical tips and ways of seeing things that made life simpler for me. So I thought I would write a little bit about it here.

First of all, the most important idea for me that Adair talks about is summarised in his diagram on the right. Adair says that to have successful teamwork, you need to keep three things in focus at all times: task needs, team needs, and individual needs. These things overlap in various ways, of course, but the important thing is that no one element dominates and none should be left out.

When you start to break these categories down into real items for a given situation, the message is really compelling. I’ll try to give some examples here.

The first one that springs to mind involves the use of this model in revising the way that the MLX teams were organised. MLX is a national event, but in the early days the organisation of it was fairly ad hoc. I had an idea about how other exchanges were run, and had been to some big Lindy Hop events like Herrang and Lismore, but running one was a different matter. I found a lot of useful stuff from other people who had organised exchanges (notably Lindy Exchanges for Dummies), but almost all of the stuff I found was related to tasks. That is, when to do things, and what to do. But not really how to do them, and certainly nothing much on the successful coordination of teams.

For MLX 2001, I had another obstacle which was that hardly anyone in Australia had ever heard of an exchange, let alone knew how to run one. A very small number of people had run workshops or dances, and most of them had either left the scene entirely or weren’t aware of the growing desire in more experienced dancers for an event that had social events as a primary focus.

All of this meant that I needed to recruit a team, explain the idea of an exchange, as well as plan all of the events that went into it. It was, I realise now, an unrealistic expectation. Naturally enough, I had plenty of friends who were keen to encourage me to do it, including lots of people who enthusiastically volunteered to help organise. That first year turned into an amazingly uplifting experience I think for just about everyone involved. The unexpected success in terms of numbers of attendees seemed to galvanise everyone, and we all just ran on the rising energy of the moment.

Once it was all over, we did an evaluation of the attendees and a fairly reasonable postmortem with the volunteers as well. There was a lot of positive feedback and lots of goodwill. Looking back on it now I realise that there was almost nothing in the way of criticism of the way it was run, and I must have had hundreds of people contact me in person or by email to tell me that we needed to do the same thing next year.

I probably should have realised a couple of things at that point. Firstly, being the main organiser with nodbody else involved in actual management, there was really nobody among the group who was able to see the organisation of the whole thing in perspective. I should also have realised that this could not be maintained if the event expanded.

In 2002, it did just that. I estimated that it almost doubled in terms of attendance that year. As a result, we had to put on a second stream of workshop classes, and we had international dancers to organise all of a sudden. It was logistically much more difficult in 2002. The management structure had not changed significantly, except for the fact that I now had Lotte around as a confidant and a huge help, and I had introduced the idea of certain volunteers taking on responsibility for certain areas. As a result, a significant proportion of the volunteer team (around 30 people as I recall) was in crisis mode for much of the time. For me, things hadn’t changed all that much, because I am mostly in problem-solving mode when organising MLX anyway, but for about 5 or 6 of the volunteers who did a lot of work, their weekend was not fun. Not all of these people were official “managers” — they were just the ones who had decided to jump in when things were not working well and sacrificed their time.

A lot of soul-searching resulted. I got sick. A couple of friendships were bruised, which is still a cause of anguish for me today. Lotte and I spent many months talking about how to improve things for the following year. In the end, Lotte’s input was invaluable. She decided that she would rather help solve the management problems herself than watch me get stressed out and sick again. Together we came up with the idea that we needed to define the new role of Volunteer Manager, and that Lotte would fill it.

The short story is that MLX 2003 was a much happier experience for the volunteers. The areas that we were able to address, I realise now, were related to the two circles in Adair’s diagram that I had neglected to some extent: building and maintaining the team and (moreso) identifying and serving individuals’ needs. There was still too much strain on Lotte and myself, and I got sick after MLX again (quite badly this time). But we had learnt an important lesson about how to manage a fairly large team (around 50 volunteers by this stage).

MLX 2004 is when we came really close to getting the formula right. First of all I had now discovered Adair’s stuff and begun to make use of it in my work, so I was now able to communicate the ideas we’d been discovering by trial and error with some clarity. For the first time, we conducted a training session for our managers, and we used the Adair principles to do it. We told them about what we’d discovered. We also gave them practical advice on how to run an event — putting together running sheets and managing small teams.

MLX 2004 was amazing because it was by far the most ambitious timetable of events we had taken on, mainly because we were taking on two major international events along with it: SwingCity and the Hellzapoppin’ World Championships. But guess what? I didn’t get sick, and I had a really, really, good time. And everyone was happy, including the managers. Friendships were built and strengthened. Volunteers gained valuable experience and skills. It was a very positive endorsement of the model above, I have to say.

DJ Challenge # 489: Charleston stuff

Crinkle wanted me to plumb the depths of my collection to find some songs for her that she could choreograph for. The challenge: “give me some nice Charleston stuff”. Now, I have an awful lot of stuff you can do the Charleston to, so I needed to think of some limitations myself. First of all I needed to limit my search to tunes that would possibly work for a performance. That removes a bunch of stuff already. Anything too long, boring, fast or slow is out. The second factor was more important — it really needs to have that authentic Charleston feel.

But what does that mean, and how do you go about finding it easily — particularly if you don’t have things categorised for different styles? I do, of course, for the purposes of teaching, but often what you use in a class isn’t what you’d use for a performance. So let’s just pretend there are no playlists helpfully grouping Charleston stuff. The two things I immediately searched on were “stomp” and “rag”. A lot of the songs from that Dixieland era were rags, of course. But I guess it wasn’t until getting that challenge that I’d really started to think about how you’d go about defining Dixieland jazz. This definition sums it up for me:

Dixieland combos usually have a rhythm section with a combination of drum kit, upright bass, piano, and banjo or guitar. The lead instruments are usually restricted trombone, trumpet, and clarinet. The definitive Dixieland sound is the simultaneous playing of the three lead instruments. [Wikipedia]

Naturally enough a lot of Dixieland tunes were rags, having grown out of ragtime. Of course, a heck of a lot of stuff was also blues, the other main jazz precursor. So what’s a stomp? Now, as every good geek knows, Google is always your friend in these circumstances, so I did a search on “definition jazz stomp”. The amusing article I turned up from Downbeat magazine is really interesting: check it out. In summary it’s a piece written in the name of Jelly Roll Morton claiming responsibility for creating “jazz and stomps”. This letter is entirely in keeping with Morton’s character if other historical accounts I’ve seen are right, so I think it may be real (notwithstanding the incorrect date at the top). But even if it’s not, it’s great reading. The first stomp was King Porter Stomp (1906), so stomps emerged after ragtime. Interesting.

Anyway my list for Crinkle is looking good. It has 4 or 5 of my favourites from Fletcher Henderson, various rags from Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, and another 4 Charleston-style novelty songs from Spike Jones, who I love for his craziness. Fats Waller is in there with his performance of the Henderson Stomp, which for some reason I don’t have from Fletcher himself. That should get her started anyway.

Video pirates and pioneers

The whole Napster story is set to repeat itself in the digital video world. With the proliferation of broadband and peer to peer network technology like eMule and Bittorrent, the cat is out of the bag. With digital video services now providing simple, consumer level products that allow video content to be captured instantly, it’s not difficult to imagine the revolution that is now taking shape. What is called TV Piracy today is an opportunity for someone to make a killing tomorrow.

Apple Computer was the big winner in the original Napster story, with the development of the iPod and iTunes Music Store. Despite the fact that there are significant questions about the way Apple has introduced its Digital Rights Management system, there’s no doubting the successful introduction of ITMS has changed the music industry forever. A profitable music on demand industry was born.

There seems no doubt that the video on demand industry will follow, but what remains to be seen is what shape a really tenable digital video download service will take. Personally, I’d have no problem at all with paying a reasonable fee for the convenience of downloading video on demand. Providing the DRM is not too restrictive, of course. Following the music example, I much prefer the DRM-free subscription service offered by eMusic.com, but Apple certainly has the better range of choice from the main labels on the ITMS. My wish is that someone would come up with a really forward-thinking download service that has minimal DRM (maybe hooked up to a set top box solution like TIVO) that makes it more worthwhile to use the legitimate service than resort to peer to peer networks.

Research project and other progess

For some reason I haven’t updated here in ages, so a lot has happened since the last entry.  I expect to hear about my ethics application in the next couple of weeks, which is when I hope to be able to actually begin collecting data. I hit a couple of snags relating to the particular student cohort, which I’m still trying to get sorted out. After finding out that DRALE isn’t being used in “group” mode in one of the subjects, I was told that it was being used in another subject.  The lecturer for that subject was away overseas, however, so I couldn’t verify this until she got back.  Sadly, it turns out she isn’t using it at all this semester.  However, yet another (smaller) group has just used it this semester.  So I hope to do a combination of the non-groupwork usage and the smaller group, which is using the system in its full glory.

It might even add a few areas for comparison that I may not have otherwise got.  I still need to write to the Dean to get approval for the study, and I may need to modify my ethics application, but it shouldn’t be too tough.

As I’ve mentioned before, the whole process is a little offputting and in my case quite frustrating, but I still see it as a learning curve. Part of the point of getting a student to do all this is surely to find out what barriers there can be, and how to overcome them.

Meanwhile I’ve now got N6 installed on top of Virtual PC 7. N6 seems to work fine.  Virtal PC is sluggish on my G4 iMac.  I want a G5! I’m not sure if this is going to be a viable solution when I really get down to data analysis.  It basically requires Virtual PC to go into fullscreen mode, which means multitasking is not easy, and that’s a big pain.

On Tuesday I finally heard that an assessor has been appointed for my progress report.  So on Wednesday I sent over the latest copy of my work with all the paperwork signed.  I don’t know what happens next — I guess I get the paperwork back with some comments in a couple of weeks or something.  All I know is that it was late getting back to Faculty because the (already extended) due date was March 28th. It wasn’t my fault, though, so I assume that it shouldn’t be a problem.

Lindy Hop and Relativity

After work I went straight to my class. We’ve been teaching a little routine to ‘Jeep Jockey Jump’ that’s starting to take shape. I was reminded tonight how tough it is teaching performance related stuff to a casual class. We always have to back track to get the routine into people’s heads. But in between all of that we always manage to divert their attention to some technical issue or other that needs attention. Tonight’s main thing was straightening out their swingouts when they get fast. It’s surprising how many ways there are to mess up something that is meant to be a ‘basic’ step, but as everyone knows, swingouts are actually really hard to get right.

Speaking of things that are hard to get right, tonight was the practice run for the Australian Jitterbug Championships. For the benefit of non-dancing readers, AJC is a national swing dancing contest — probably one of the big two. I’m the head judge this year, and tonight was a jack & jill contest — a fun style of contest where you don’t know who your partner will be. The reason we needed a practice run-through was that the AJC is switching over to a relative placement scoring system. The system was a success, but it’s always difficult to score people relatively. There’s always two couples you just can’t separate for some reason. Still, I do believe a relative system is pretty fair.