Projects

Abstract

Digitópia is a project based in a free access digital music laboratory located at the main hall of Casa da Música. Started in 2007, it rapidly transformed the initial computer-based activities paradigm into the computer-mediated activities paradigm. Trained supervisors are available at due hours and days to help and/or introduce users to the equipment and to run workshops for primary and secondary school’s children, in music creation/performance. In 2011, as part of a protocol with Casa da Música, CIPEM started a study to understand the impact of the project Digitopia in primary/secondary schools of Porto and the mentoring of computer-mediated digital music creation communities. The systematic collection of data comprised documental analysis, interviews, observations of activities and questionnaires to music education teachers and common users with the aim of understanding how Digitopia is supporting music classes, contributing to change the way music is produced, and how new digital communities are arising. The interpretation of the collected data has been made according to the theories of formal, non-formal and informal education (La Belle, 1982; Freire, 1997; Gohn, 1999; Wille, 2003; Gadotti, 2005, Almeida e Del Ben, 2005) and the research studies of Hargreaves, Marshall e North (2003), Batt-Rawden & DeNora (2005) e Webster (2007), that have been analysing the effects of the use of ICT’s in music education and its influence in the construction and modelling/shaping of new socio-cultural models. The goal is to achieve a critical analysis of the educative intervention of Digitópia among the scholar and the undifferentiated users, and try to answer the following questions: - How many children use systematically the tools proposed by Digitópia? In which contexts do they use them? - How many teachers use these tools in their own music production and to support musical activities in the classroom? What activities and skills are being developed/supported? - Are these digital tools user-friendly to children and teachers? - What is teacher’s mental representation of these tools (sophisticated toys, videogame consoles, real instruments Band-in-a-box)?

Research Team

Funding Body

CIPEM/Casa da Música

Period

2011 to 2015

Keywords

Computer-mediated activities, informal/non-formal/ formal musical learning, digital music communities, community of practice