Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Think of all of the types of communication you have available to you right now.  There are so many that we need to categorize them just to be able to conceive of them at one time in one place.

We have immediate face-to-face types of communication like conversations and speeches.  We have immediate distance types of communication like telephone conversations, video conferences, and instant messages.  These are usually two-way communications but they need not be.  You can watch a live speech without being present; C-SPAN regularly covers the live events of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  Finally, we have communication that is not immediate or live.  This can include written material, like books and magazine articles, advertisements, television shows, recorded events, recorded messages, email, home video, blogs, podcasts, etc.  Heck, even player-piano rolls are communication.

Further there are Multiple User Virtual Environments in which the participant not only communicates, but experiences the same virtual conditions as the person he or she is conversing with.  I’ll go more deeply into MUVEs  in the future.

Most of these types of communication are used in education.  Text messaging via cell phones seems to be left out in the cold, but all other kinds of graphic, aural, and textual communications are used extensively.  This is what I teach when presenting blogging and podcasting.  It is communication.  The difference between older types of communication and podcasting, for example, is the sophistication of the media and its relative novelty.  So I found it fairly easy to adopt blogging and podcasting as appropriate and useful for education.

The one type of communication we have not had, until now, is the live remote manipulation of a musical instrument.  Yamaha has released a new version of the Disklavier model grand piano that has a built in internet connection.  With two of these pianos it is possible for one person to play both more or less simultaneously.  In much the same way that an LCD projector mirrors a computer monitor, a connected Disklavier can mirror the playing of a pianist on the other side of the planet, as her or she is playing.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/the-e-piano-competition/

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=400dbade9d86303000ecfaad7890996ebd49304a

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89713240&ft=1&f=1006

The possibilities seem mind boggling. I need to run this through the Amish Tedchnology filter process and see if I can come up with a reason for being as excited as this development seems.

I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Daniel

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