Posts

I have a commentary published in the Norwegian academic newspaper Khrono today with the title “Micro-education is the future”. The reason I ended up writing the piece was because of my frustration with working “against” the Norwegian system when it comes exploring new educational strategies. As I have written about here on the blog before, I have tested a number of different educational methods and formats over the last years, including Music Moves, Carpentry-style workshops, and, of course, our joint master’s programme Music, Communication & Technology....

I was at NTNU in Trondheim today, teaching a workshop on motion capture methodologies for the students in the Choreomundus master’s programme. This is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD) investigating dance and other movement systems (ritual practices, martial arts, games and physical theatre) as intangible cultural heritage. I am really impressed by this programme! It was a very nice and friendly group of students from all over the world, and they are experiencing a truly unique education run by the 4 partner universities....

We have just kicked off the fourth round of Music Moves, the free, online course we have developed at University of Oslo. The course introduces a lot of the core theories, concepts and methodologies that we work with at RITMO. This time around we also have participants from both the MCT master’s programme and the NordicSMC Winter School taking the course as an introduction to further on-campus studies. To help with running the course, we have recruited Ruby Topping, who is currently an exchange student at University of Oslo....

Plan S has been the biggest political topic in the research community here in Norway this fall. Several researchers have raised their concerned voices. I am among the positive ones, and I will here try to explain why. Just to rewind a little first. Coalition S is a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC). On 4 September 2018 they announced Plan S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality:...

Open Science is on everyone’s lips these days. But why don’t we use the term Open Research more? This is a question I have been asking regularly after I was named Norwegian representative in EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0 / Open Sciencecommittee earlier this year. For those who don’t know, the European University Association (EUA) represents more than 800 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 48 European countries. It is thus a very interesting organization when it comes to influencing the European higher education and research environment....

I have not been very good at blogging recently, primarily because I have been so busy in starting up both RITMO and MCT. As things are calming down a bit now, I am also trying to do some digital cleaning up, archiving files, organizing photos, etc. As part of the cleanup, I came across this picture of my setup for a lecture-performance held at the humanities library earlier this fall. It consists of a number of sound makers, various types of acoustic ones, and also some electronic....

I was invited to talk about my experiences with flipped classroom methodologies at a seminar at the Faculty of Humanities last week. Preparing for the talk got me to revisit my own journey of working towards flipped teaching methodologies. This has also involved explorations of various types of audio/video recording. I will go through them in chronological order. Podcasting Back in 2009-2011, I created “podcasts” of my lectures a couple of semesters, such as in the course MUS2006 Music and Body Movements (which was at the time taught in Norwegian)....

I have lots and lots of photos on my computer (and servers!). Sometimes I have a pile of photos of which I want to find only the ones that are in portrait or landscape mode. This can be done manually for a few images, but browsing through thousands of them is more tricky. Then I often tend to use a nifty little shell script that I found here. It effectively sorts all images into two folders automagically....

Yesterday I presented the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab in the late-breaking demo session at the ISMIR conference in Paris. The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab (MGT) aims at assisting music researchers with importing, preprocessing, analyzing, and visualizing video, audio, and motion capture data in a coherent manner within Matlab. Most of the concepts in the toolbox are based on the Musical Gestures Toolbox that I first developed for Max more than a decade ago....

Publications are important for researchers. Therefore deciding on who should be named as author for an academic publication is a topic that often leads to discussions. Also the ordering of the author names in a publication is a topic for heated debate, and particularly when you work in interdisciplinary teams with different traditions, as can be seen in the version from PhD Comics below. Here is a task I have developed as a point of departure for discussing this issue in research groups....