Archive for Teaching

Completed Questions: Experimental Group Voice class

{ 2008 June 23 @ 10:54 am } · { Creativity, Love, Meditation, Music, Music Composition, Music Production, Sharing, Solutions, Stories, Teaching, Therapy, Truth, Work }
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Experimental Group Voice, Keith Rowley

  1. 1.How will this activity attract University of Washington students? This activity will attract UW students by being experientially effective. That is, participants will not only know they have been through an exciting event, they will feel it. This course will expand their range of expression, emotion, feeling, and interrelationships, and in so doing, students will be so excited at their growth they will feel compelled to tell others about it.
  2. Why do you want to teach this class? Because I am excited by the expressive and connecting potential of the human voice. And I want to empower people to explore their humanity, their compassion, and their ability to connect the deepest parts of themselves with the deepest parts of others.
  3. What skills and/or knowledge do you hope the students will gain from the activity? Primarily, I hope students will gain trust in themselves and their classmates. I hope they will learn to trust their own ability to express themselves more fully, trust in their power to overcome any fear of expressing themselves, trust in their ability to share themselves fully with others, and trust in the effectiveness of both opening themselves to others, and being open with others. I hope they learn that by being open to others, by listening to others, and by being committed to the process, they will create something larger than they can alone.
  4. What exercizes will the students participate in? Exercises will include visualization (controlling their emotions), meditation (getting in touch with their emotions), breathing (controlling their voices), calisthenics (enabling a wider range of expression), communication and listening (opening themselves to others), and vocalizing, employing various musical elements such as rhythm, melody, harmony, dissonance, tone/timbre, volume/amplitude, texture (monophonic, polyphonic), etc.
  5. What supplies and/or equipment will the student need to provide? Just their self, their voice, and an open mind, heart, and ears.
  6. What supplies will the student receive? Perhaps some printed inspirational resources, and/or audio CDs.
  7. Please describe your background in this area and your teaching/training background. I have been singing since before I can remember. My family of seven sang rounds together in the car all the time. I have sung in choirs starting in seventh grade, and made the Texas All-State Choir in 1981. I have 20 years experience singing semi-professionally. I have also been teaching at the college level since 2000, and am currently teaching at Bellevue Community College.

Course Outline for Experimental College Voice Class

{ 2008 June 20 @ 10:18 pm } · { Composition, Creativity, Love, Meditation, Music, Music Composition, Music Production, Production, Sharing, Solutions, Teaching, Therapy }
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  1. General course description
    1. Subject matter covered in this course
    2. This class will cover various experiential approaches to vocalization, including texture and harmony, as a group. We will concentrate on eliciting a variety of emotions, as a group, using only our voices and bodies.
    3. My approach to teaching this content will be both very experiential and experimental. I will use various means to engage and prepare students for our attempts to work together to elicit specific emotions.
    4. The only prerequisites for this course are the willingness to vocalize with other people, and a willingness to be open to all sorts of possible experiences.
    5. This class will draw on various elements of choral composition, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, dissonance, tone/timbre, volume/amplitude, texture, etc. It will also draw upon visualization, meditation, calisthenics, and breathing techniques.
    6. Students might find it helpful to draw upon their experiences working in groups (not necessarily singing in groups!), and in meditative environments.
  1. Method of course delivery
    • The course will mainly entail learning together, as a group.
    • In fact, the main point of this class is to create what we cannot create alone.
    • Students will be sticking to the pace of the group’s growth. I will encourage students to engage in active listening throughout their lives, by listening to various artists, as well as the world around them, in an effort to broaden their “palette” of sounds with which to elicit emotion. But the point of the class is, again, to create together what we cannot create alone.
    • Inspirational resources may be provided via audio CDs and/or printed material.
  1. General course goals/objectives
    • Students will directly experience working in a group.
    • Students will directly experience creating something as a group that they cannot create on their own.
    • Students will broaden:
      • 1) their relationships with others
      • 2) their ideas of what music is
      • 3) the limitations of their feelings
      • 4) the limitations of their expression
  1. Outline of overall course structure (i.e., lessons/topics)
    • The course is broken down into combinations of “preparation-to-create” and “approach-to-creation.”
      • “Preparation-to-create” is: calisthenics, meditation, breathing, and visualization.
      • “Approach-to-creation” is: visualization, and the various choral-composition techniques, such as texture, harmony, melody, unity, dissonance, rhythm, amplitude/volume, and tone/timbre.
    • The course will last an hour and a half, once a week, for six weeks.
    • Each week I will present a new combination of “preparation” and “approach.”

Experimental Voice Class: Summary/Description

{ 2008 June 20 @ 9:06 pm } · { Composition, Creativity, Love, Meditation, Music, Music Composition, Music Production, Production, Sharing, Solutions, Teaching, Therapy }
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In this class, people will use their voices to elicit emotion. The class is inherently experiential and experimental, with the participants exploring their voices, their emotions, and their interrelationships, all within a safe, fun, and enticing environment. Exercises will include visualization, meditation, breathing, calisthenics, rhythm, melody, harmony, dissonance, tone/timbre, volume/amplitude, texture (monophonic, polyphonic), etc. In such an experimental and interactive creative environment, we will foster community via people sharing in the creation and experience of a wide array of emotions, including love, sadness, joy, power, anger, grooviness, happiness, play, confusion, and peace.

Teaching Online! + GRACIBOOK!!! + Parallels Desktop + Social Networking

{ 2008 April 5 @ 7:07 am } · { Macintosh, Problems, Social Networking, Software, Teaching, Technology }
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Yes, FIVE freaking classes! Three of them are 1-credit-hour PowerPoint: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. The other two are BTS 161, the MS Office class. Just had first “Hybrid” class this evening, and it went really well. I think I’m definitely gonna like just one day a week on campus. Keeps us focused.

Had a nice little ice breaker, they paired off and interviewed each other.

Took break, hadda guest speaker, then dove into Blackboard Vista. Good stuff, good questions, mostly having to do with “can I run Office 2007 in XP?”, “can I run XP in Vista?”, “Can I run Vista in Office 2003?” kinda questions… I get that all the time, questions confusing the operating system with applications that run inside the operating system…

–
OH S***E!!!!!!!! I forgot to journal this, but I HAVE A NEW FREAKIN’ MACBOOK PRO!!!!!! And I am SO freakin’ HAPPY!!!!!! Woo-Hoo!!!!!! Yes, here she is, GraciBook:

GraciBook

Ah, yes, she’s a beauty, all right:

MacBook Pro (late 2006)
Intel Core 2 Duo (dual-core: TWO PROCESSORS!!!)
2.16 GHz
2 GB RAM
667 MHz System Bus speed
120 GB, 5400-rpm SATA HD
6x Dual-Layer Super Drive
built-in iSight camera!
802.11g Airport card
digital+analog combo-jack audio in & out

Purchased used on March 26, 2008, for $1350 (cash!), from Josh Bryant in Kirkland.
2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
Serial #: xxxxxxxxx

Introduced Oct 2006
Discontinued June 2007

And, I’m just havign a TON o’ FUN with her!

–

zzz

–

Installing– well, I installed– Parallels Desktop, trial version. But having problems getting it to Authorize. Here’s the error:

The activation key relates to the license, which is not active yet. Please check your local date and time settings.

So, here’s the “date and time” they sent me in the accompanying email:

PRODUCT : Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac
ACTIVATION KEY : xxxxxxxxxxxx
START DATE : 2008/04/04
END DATE : 2008/04/19

And it IS already Friday, April 4, at 12:34 AM…

I sent them an email. I really want this to work!!!

–

Been also really getting into “social networking”: e.g., Facebook, Twitter, chatting. Have really re-connected with Dell and Lawrence, and Denise to an extent. Also several old CC people in FB: Louis Katz, Phil Johnson, Rick Olmos, Tony Yarbray, Amanda (the smart blonde frm Lotus Cup, Imelda Bettinger (the freakin’ Social Networking QUEEN!).

But I really like Facebook. WAY better than Myspace– just cleaner, more professional, unlke Myspace,whic always seems hacked together out of scrapcrap.

And Twitter! HA! Journler was my introduction to Twitter! Yeah, J-Tweets! …which I never cd get to work right…

But Twitter is cool because of a couple things. 1. It’s easy: just single-sentence “micro-blogging,” really, answering the question, “what are you doing now?”

And 2. Everybody’s doing it! Especially freakin’ @imelda! But I got Deana doing it alot, and Terri some. Kinda wish I cd get LG & Dell to do it, but they do update their Facebook statuses pretty regularly.

And Twitters GO/Post to my FB acct; just wish there were now a way to get FB status updates to Twitter…

Can even “Jott” a voicemail message to Twitter! Yeah, Jott is this cool new system for transcribing Voice messages into Text! And it works VERY well! Yeah, you just call up their toll free 866 number, tell them who your message is for (“twitter”), and then leave the “twit.” Thrity seconds later, it’s posted as your latest Twittering! F***ING cool, man!!!

Protected: God Is.

{ 2007 November 6 @ 12:16 pm } · { Change, Creativity, Digital Imaging, Love, Problems, Teaching }
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