Getting Started - To-Do

1. Create a blog (hosted anywhere)
2. Provide link to Alex for posting here
3. Set personal goals for this summer and post to your blog
4. Explore various projects and links to familiarize yourself with our work
5. Start MaKey MaKey instructable - Deadline June 30

Next Steps

1. Sign up for ScratchEd google group - 
2. Take Online Scratch course (June through mid-July) and document your experiences (daily) taking the course. What's working well? What could we adopt as "best practices" in our music education work?
3. Create Sound Thinking YouTube Channel
4. Create Sound Thinking Scratch 2.0 Studio
5. Create Creative Music Projects Scratch 2.0 Studio

Project Overview

• Noteflight.com Forum Analysis 
• Paper for publication
• Forum analysis tool development
• Performamatics Media
• Sound Thinking Course Material Organizing and Archiving
• YouTube Channel - project videos
• ScratchEd - post curricular materials
• Scratch 2.0 - Code examples
• Scratch Music Projects
• YouTube Channel
• Scratch 2.0 - code examples
• Curate cool Scratch Music projects as Studios
• MaKey MaKey Music Projects
• Public blog
• Videos of projects
• Code for projects 
• Scratch
• Arduino Hacks
• Wireless
• Websites for MaKey Music Hacking
• Custom Music Remix site ala
• Online Music Making and Learning Supports Documentary Blog
• Reflections on learning via CodeAcademy
• Reflection on Scratch Online Conference Learning
• Reflections on learning through OAIM or ArtistWorks?

Expectations

• Ask questions ... often!
• Work independently; check in often
• Create a blog and make daily entries (during work days) summarizing and presenting what you've worked on. These will be linked here, so that we can all follow along.
• Create goals and work toward them
• Have fun!

Summer Email 2

I would like you both to follow this ScratchEd Google group: https://plus.google.com/communities/116632236256522474009

They will be launching an online creative computing workshop from early June to mid-July. I'd like you both to participate in it, taking notes about your experiences learning in the workshop. It will culminate in a visit to Harvard on July 12. As part of your work with me this summer, I'd like you to document your experiences learning in this format... what worked well, what did not work so well, especially paying attention to the design of the learning experience and the tools used to help facilitate learning. You might also be interested in the content. :)

Matt, how is your CodeAcademy work going? Which language(s) are you learning? How is that experience going? I am going through the javascript, python, and API courses right now, too. 

As you might be able to see, part of our work this summer is figuring out best practices of blended and online learning and professional development around web-based creative tools. In Codeacademy, it's the coding tools; in the Scratch workshop, it's Scratch 2.0. What I hope to gain out of our study is a set of tools and best practices that we can use to develop similar workshops in future summers and years around Noteflight.com and some of the EchoNest hack tools I will be developing. Even though I'm going to NYU this Fall, there will be opportunities (hopefully funded!) for you all to continue to work with me if you'd like. 

Part of taking our Scratch+Music work further is developing similar workshops and tools for learning for students and teachers. Our work this summer will help move our team toward that. It would be great to be able to run some online short courses for teachers around Scratch and MaKey MaKey using similar formats and tools this coming year. 

Another aspect of our upcoming work will be to assemble, preserve and present many of the student projects - code, audio files, images, and videos - from our Sound Thinking and MaKey MaKey computing+music classes and workshops in an online site for educators. We'll also want to tag and cross-reference this content to computational and musical concepts and processes. Keep your eyes peeled for technologies and sites that may be good models for us. We'll definitely populate a couple YouTube/Vimeo channels and at least set up a learning community/blog... possibly as a part of the ScratchEd website - http://ScratchEd.media.mit.edu/.

If there are any specific goals or things you'd like to have as outcomes from this summer project, please let me know. I know I asked you about these before, but they might have clarified or shifted in the intervening time. Just let me know. 

Are you all free for an all-day meeting on Friday, May 31? We could use that as our first orientation day. Also, I would like to invite you to participate in our Music Technology Educator Meetup on Saturday June 1 from 10am-1pm.  This is our last one of the year. Teachers have met the first Saturday of each month on campus to share projects and to learn more about music education technology throughout the year. It would be great to have you there. 

Summer Email 1

I'm looking forward to working with each of you as a team this summer on a variety of research projects. I've waited until now to bring you all together because I know you're busy with end of the semester projects, concerts and finals. We have a number of cool projects that we will work hard on finishing up this summer!

I will be leaving this weekend to attend my brother's graduation from Med school later this week. I plan on being back around May 26. So, to keep things simple, let's plan on our work happening starting June 1 and going through July 31. If you have any travel coming up during those dates, please simply let me know now and we'll work around them. 

In the intervening last weeks of May, I hope you'll do some prep work for things. I am working on assembling this now and will get it to you ASAP. I've put an initial list of things at the end of this email.

In other news, I wanted to let each of you know that I've accepted a new position at NYU as a tenured Associate Professor of Music Education and Music Technology starting in September. It's an amazing opportunity for me and for my wife Anne. We'll be living in faculty housing in Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and I'll be launching a research center in music education and technology. The work we work on this summer will continue with me at NYU and I hope you'll stay involved to the degree that you'd like to. 

There are many opportunities for you all to help co-author some papers and co-present workshops and presentations at professional conferences. I'll talk more about that if that is something you'd like to do when we meet up in person in June.

So, I'm very much looking forward to working with you individually and as a team. I want you to get as much out of this experience as possible, so please reply to this email telling me some of your goals for this summer. Are there any specific skills or experiences you'd like to have? Any content you'd like to learn?

Stuff to take a look at to prepare yourself:

1. Familiarize yourself with the Noteflight.com forums - http://www.noteflight.com/forums

2. Familiarize yourself with the various music "hacks" at - http://labs.echonest.com/

3. Familiarize yourself with Music Delta - http://us.musicdelta.com/ (login with your Google account)

4. Familiarize yourself with our Performamatics research - http://performamatics.com/

Projects:

Our projects for this summer will revolve around the above listed sites and technologies. We'll be developing research tools for exploring the Noteflight.com forums, assembling computing+music exemplars from our Performamatics research, working with the new Scratch 2.0 environment (http://scratch.mit.edu), and developing some new tools and content for Music Delta. 

Once I hear back from you about your goals, I'll be better able to define your job description and work plan. The three of us will regularly join with 3 undergraduate computer science students and 1computer science graduate student. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!