7.6.2014

So this is my first blog ever and I'm supposed to use it to connect my Masters in Learning and Technology (MALAT) from Royal Roads University to my real life and passions. So where to begin? Hmmm...Ok, so I'll start with what brought me to this course of study: music and technology. 
I'm a professional keyboardist and music educator and I have been using music software technology since it hit the market back in the early 1980s. I worked for many years as a Keyboard Product Specialist in a large music store and, strangely enough, in all the bands I have worked with through my many years of performing, all my band mates simply assumed that I would know the tech stuff because I was the keyboardist. If there was ever any technical issue at all, they turned to me. So there really was no escape from technology for me. I learned by doing at a time when no-one was teaching it. 
I started a music teaching studio in 1983 complete with a digital piano, a music computer, and drum machine, and several sound modules. I could create MIDI recordings of my students' lessons, have software notate what they played right there in front of them, and have little kids play the same piece over and over but with a different timbre on each pass. I worked as well as a music teacher at a private music school, complete with multiple keyboards and headsets in a lab, where I could tap into any of the individuals, listen to them play, converse with them and give them pointers privately over headsets, then move on to another in the group. It should be no wonder that I found the connection between technology and education so fascinating.
My teaching experience, performing experience, and formal music education eventually led me to an opportunity to start up a Music Industry and Performance program at College of the North Atlantic, in Newfoundland and Labrador. I incorporated as much technology as I could into the lab/classroom environment but after many years of teaching music at the college level, and using technology on a daily basis in order to do it, I decided that I wanted more than to just use it; I wanted to better understand WHY we use it, HOW others are using it, and WHERE the future might bring it. That led me to to Royal Roads University and the MALAT program.
So this is where I will start my first blog, by looking back to see where this interest in tech and education started for me. Let's see where it will eventually take me...