Graduation and thinking about the future

I'm graduating on Wednesday. Monday is the Valedictory festival, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing all my friends and family at Radio City. RADIO CITY?!?! Hot damn!
That'll be a cool story to tell me kids.

I've been reading music education philosophy all semester, which has been a great experience, but I think I need to start a novel. It's been too long since I've read a good story.
(Note: I did read Farm City by Novella Carpenter, but that was just one. I need more!)

On that note:
Great reads to pick up at your local library (Bobst) if you're interested in music education philosophy.

Oxford Handbook on Music Education (Vol. I and II)
Oxford Handbook on Philosophy in Music Education
Music Matters - NYU's own David Elliott
Praxial Music Education - Edited by David Elliott.
-This one features some great essays by NYU visiting professor Wayne D. Bowman, as well as others by many great thinkers. My favorite was Patricia O'Toole's "Why Don't I Feel Included in These Musics, or Matters"

I would also highly recommend reading articles from the ACT Journal
http://act.maydaygroup.org/

And here are three books that I read last year in a course with Wayne D. Bowman that really changed my thinking for the broader and better:
Music As Social Life: The Politics of Participation - Thomas Turino
Musicking - Christopher Small
Heartland Excursions - Bruno Nettl

Another really fascinating (and brief!) article is Julie Koza's "Listening for Whiteness"

More on peer websites

I love how Louis started up his website with a fun fact about him. Check it out if you haven't:
https://files.nyu.edu/lsr284/public/

I also love how Louis gives you the red pill option. Is Tech Resources therefore the blue pill?

Cool points of Louis's website:

Link to his band page
The fractal filter he put his bicycle photo through. It looks like a kaleidoscope.

Comments on Louis's blog:
On the topic of comparing browser. Excellent advise for the web developer:
"check your work in every browser"
http://technicalfowl.blogspot.com/

I'll add to that, on every device too! If you have a friend with an iPhone, iPad, Android etc. make sure all your photos, videos, audio etc. load and play on each of those devices. It'd be a bummer for someone to miss out because your website isn't iPhone compatible.

Upon Seeing Others . . .

Upon seeing other people Files 2.0 websites. I decided to change mine around a little bit.
What was great about this is that I knew exactly was I needed to do in order to achieve the desired results. I guess that means the course was pretty effective!

Did you know?

My favorite part about visiting the Bio pages of everyone's websites is finding out all I never knew about my classmates. Here are some of my favorites.

Juan worked as a composer/arranger for the film Across the Universe.

Fangyuan, who is originally from China, has taught music in South Africa.

Richard was in the Broadway production of Mamma Mia

End of the Semester

What a semester it has been. Tech Resources has been a great resource for me. I feel I have learned a lot a very useful information from this class. I've been going through the assignment check list and have found little pieces of my assignment missing. Fortunately, Prof. Yen gave us a very clear checklist!

One thing I'm finding as I check over these assignments is that I can apply what I learned later in the course (especially html tables) to my earlier assignments, which gives them a slightly less amateur look.

Another things I'm noticing is all the slight character mistakes I've made that have made my HTML pages not work perfectly. At Prof. Yen says, we're human, we're going to make mistakes. Writing code is like a game of Where's Waldo?

One problem I'm still having with my video page is getting my controller to show up on my embedded video . . . hmmm . . .

Fruit

I love how Professor Yen brings fruit every week. All professors should do this.

Other suggestions:
Veggie and Hummus platter
Pizza
Garlic Knots
Fresh Juice
Ice Cream
Dumplings

Don't take these suggestions too seriously. I'm just kidding.

Thanks! woohooo!!!

Dubstep!

I taught unit on Dubstep to the Digital Music class at Bronx Science. I am in NO WAY a Dubstep practitioner, but I wanted to teach the students how to design sounds (we used the ES 2 synthesizer in Logic Pro). Overall, I think the project was successful. I definitely learned a fair amount about writing a rubric and planning lesson sequences. I also had pretty terrible aims and do nows on a couple of days. Great learning for all! NEVER STOP LEARNING! HUH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKlm9iZIeSY