In November 1997, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the ATMI (Association for Technology in Music Instruction) annual conference, held in Cleveland, Ohio. My visit was undertaken with the joint aims of presenting the work of CTI Music, demonstrating the TLTP CD-Tour Generator, and finding out more about the Association and its work.
ATMI 97 was an almost all-American-continent conference: as far as I know, I was the only European attending. This made it an exciting, if sometimes confusing, experience, as entire areas of apparently common curricula (such as music arrangement for marching bands) were unfamiliar to me.
From a CTI point of view, I spent much of my time at the conference alternating between enthusiasm and despair. My own enthusiasm was generated by the hard-working and enthusiastic ethos of the community I had joined for four days, and by the many innovative solutions I saw to challenges that face music educators on both sides of the Atlantic. The need for imaginative presentation of potentially confusing or dry material, for instance, along with coping with lower levels of background knowledge in incoming students, and helping talented performers who have inadequate notation skills or knowledge of theory are familiar to many of us. My despair was brought on by two repeating frustrations with the work that was described in the papers: lack of evaluation and a startling lack of availability.
In the sciences and engineering, whilst the end result may not be a book but either a journal article or a physical product, it is usual to expect the data that formed the basis or justification for any new finding or theory to be made available to other scholars, so that they may verify the conclusions against their own ideas and methods. When the data is withheld, it is usully because the product is available for sale.
In education, rather as in medicine and the social sciences, it may not always be appropriate to make student-related data available to outsiders. In these circumstances it is surely even more important to make available the materials themselves.
1. to present interesting new findings on the processes of education: in these presentations the educational materials developed, the tools as it were, may be of less interest than the results obtained from their use.
2. to present a new tool or technique for teaching: in this case the tool itself is the subject of the paper.
In the latter case, it seems to me that there is little value in describing the tool at all if it cannot be made available to other potential users. What use is there in describing to colleagues the way in which a year's work produced a valuable course, if all that they gain is the knowledge that if they spend a year doing it for themselves, their own students might benefit too? Like children at the window of a sweet-shop after closing time, listeners are left with more of a sense of deprivation than of illumination.
I appreciate that it would be financial and professional suicide to spend a year writing a course for which your employers have paid you - and for which they will charge their students - and then to give it away to all comers. But there are deeper and educationally more interesting issues behind the withholding of new projects. Again this was brought home to me at ATMI when a presenter described what was clearly an innovative and effective on-line distance-learning programme. In the question time, after the technicalities and the results details were addressed, the overriding questions were 'May we see it?', 'May we use it?', 'Can we buy access to it?'. The answer was that the programme had not been made available yet because it was not completely finished.
In Music, of all subjects, this struck me as tragically ironic. If an instrumental student refused to play during term time because their performance and interpretation was not ready for their final recital, they would be reminded that the whole process of education was about sharing the draft version to gain from the experience and knowledge of their peers. Surely the same must be true of the development of new teaching materials. Moreover, I am reminded of the advice that Jim Ridgway of Lancaster University gave the TLTP at its start: 'Make mistakes and, more importantly, make them early'. My suspicion is that by the time the distance learning programme was deemed by its authors to be properly finished, they would have no desire to start modifying it in the light of any comments their colleagues in other institutions might make.
I hope that none of this polemic will be seen as criticism of ATMI, and still less of the talented and dedicated tutors who shared their work and experiences in Cleveland. Neither am I ignoring the fact that the overriding reason for not making musical materials widely available is usually one of copyright. In the UK too we are probably more hamstrung by this than by any other consideration. I am guilty of demonstrating the best of the Music TLTP modules, and of the NetMuse projects, only to tell my audience (whose teaching is paid for by the council which commissioned the software development) that they can only have the silent version! My hope is that funding bodies, be they institutional or national, will come to realise that there is just not time for everyone to make their own solutions, and that collaboration, peer review and sensible licensing are the most effective ways for the academic community world-wide to create the educational materials and techniques of the future.