Learning 2.0 Conference Mash-up (or, "The Funky Fryer")

More education. Less schooliness.

Learning 2.0 Conference Mash-up (or, "The Funky Fryer")

A little more fun from the afterglow of the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference….

I took Wes Fryer’s workshop on how to compose music using GarageBand, and walked my Web 2.0 activity block students through it by creating a funk song in about ten minutes (okay, it’s a one-minute fragment, really, needing a bridge, chorus, and so forth - but it’s a start). They loved watching me play the fool and sing funk for the vocal track, and duplicating it to make a “deep soul” harmony track.

Fun and games? Yes. Learning? Yes yes yes! Why? No copyright violation if you create your own songs; more engagement; more “learning to learn” instead of memorizing ubiquitously accessible inert data (i.e., being a traditional student).

Anyway, I pulled the song from GarageBand to iMovie, then pulled photos tagged learn2cn on Flickr from iPhoto to iMovie as well, and threw a few of my photos from my own years in China as well.

The result? The funkiest Chinese travelogue ever created (and the worst mismatch of image and soundtrack known to humankind). Featuring funky guest stars Jeff Utecht, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Kim Cofino, Wes Fryer (talk about “speed of creativity” - Wes taught me the GarageBand skills to make this song in about 20 minutes!), and Will Richardson.

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