Overcoming distance education hurdles

Earlier this year I got a scholarship to train as a teacher

It's been fun to go back to uni, although I am conscious the attrition rate for distance education is higher than that for students studying education.

One of my assessments for uni this semester is the aptly-named "hurdle" worth 0% that involves sitting the LANTITE test required of teachers to demonstrate literacy and numeracy.

This test uses a remote proctoring service based in the USA for regional students and was posing problems with my laptop's RAM and broadband.

After I saw the Country Universities Centre promoted having high-speed broadband, I joined up.

(I had resisted previously because I don't need their other services and who wants to be associated with an acronym that sounds like cuck?)

It was disappointing to see their broadband connection in Leeton was worse than the one I have at home. 

Australian internet often leaves a lot to be desired and service providers have been criticised for promoting speeds that don't reflect the limited bandwidth available during peak times.

Anyway, I think I've found a solution for my final LANTITE attempt today for 2024.

I reduced the screen resolution from 1920 pixels to 720 and now the proctoring service's test says I could host four students on my connection!

Now I'm wondering if I should offer my caravan as a study centre? 

Where did the bands go?

Rick Beato raises an interesting observation here about how few contemporary bands appear in the charts

I think one of the things he misses is that pretty much all of recorded music is available online. In the past albums would go out of print, unless they were really popular.

The other thing is that contemporary music is so much more competitive, with that many more artists and they don't get the budgets and experience available to previous generations.

(Part of me is amazed at the older stuff that my kids listen to, but another part of me ponders those two points above.)

Another factor influencing their ongoing success might be that by the 1990s many bands had stopped touring material before recording it, which means they wrote and recorded songs without performing them for audiences and missed having that opportunity to fine-tune structures or develop material beyond to be more memorable.

And, yet another idea, the demise of bands fits within a broader trend identified in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam published in the year 2000. (After all, Regurgitator sang that "Music is sport!")

Peed off

Sometimes I wonder why I always need to wee, then I remember that I use questions like this one as a prompt to make a cuppa

There really are too many questions in a day, I think.

Recently I read that teachers make an average of 1500 decisions each day and I know that for me this will be mostly deciding not to drink cuppas since I can't wee during classes.

Dear artists

Creative expression is part of my weeks, though not as daily as it used to be

I like writing to work through thoughts and making music to forget others. 

And playing drums or dancing for 10 minutes is a mood-changer.

Collaborations

Music has always been the key requirement for membership of an online colony, along with English for me

The earliest was the Ninja Tune forum that introduced so many remixing techniques, which continues in the Shinobi Cuts Remix Chain albums.

In the last month I've had a couple of collaborations with my online communities, particularly the Disquiet Junto. The prompt to compose with a 29/16 time signature arose from a conversation with Oscar about the Mother 3 video game.

That led to two tracks and the second became a soundtrack for a walk-through the Marea Bright exhibition at the Museum of the Riverina.

 

 

Naviar Records shared my senryu this week and it led me to filter the noise from a South Coast video.

What a night!

Pain in the arts

This morning I listened to a discussion about engaging men in the arts

I know it seems weird, given how men are disproportionately represented in galleries and earnings and other metrics.

Yet, once you get past the marquee banners outside those institutions and the million-dollar prices in auction houses, there are less men involved.

Particularly when you go beyond leadership roles or anything that might convey status.

And it was obvious in the Zoom session that, aside from the panel and one gender-ambiguous name, I might've been the only male in the audience.

In fact only three of four men promoted as being on the panel showed up!

So I asked a few pointed questions about the opportunities for men to engage with the arts and hoped to get a conversation going.

For example, I questioned whether education is to blame as a lot of the exercises I see in primary schools are largely paint-by-numbers-type activities rather than processes that encourage reflection.

It's the way that practicing art prompts me to acknowledge my emotional well-being that I think points to the greatest benefits of promoting creative activities.

I mentioned how liberating it is to make art in a regional area and also shared my favourite quote:

“Amateurism,” says Sharifullin, “is what defines provinciality. On the other hand, it’s hard to stay professional when you’re surrounded by philistine stereotypes. People think you’re a weirdo if your happiness doesn’t depend on the size of your bank account. So you must have balls of steel to do arts. It’s not that bad if you have a few like-minded people around, though.”

After the Zoom session ended and I'd been for a walk, I reflected on the subject by thinking about my sons.

There's a distinct difference between the oldest and the youngest when it comes to creative practice.

One of them is an active writer and singer, while the other has hated art since he started school.

Then it occurred to me the former is less self-conscious and perhaps more confident in making art, while the latter has often looked for approval from peers.

As I pondered this I returned to the idea that "you must have balls of steel to do arts."

Could it be that men don't engage with the arts because they don't feel confident?

It brought to mind the powerful observation from bell hooks in her book The Will to Change:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.
 

Art is not what you see