Leonardo Fellow in Technology and Arts Education | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo Fellow in Technology and Arts Education

By Jordan Hochenbaum
Hi Leonardo readers! My name is Jordan Hochenbaum and I’m a professor at California Institute of the Arts, where I teach in the Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design (MTIID) and Digital Media programs. During my Ph.D. I investigated the affordances of applying multimodal analysis to a musician’s daily instrumental practice. This approach demonstrated the ability to use technology to help a musician track their performance and training, while opening up doors that could provide pedagogical insights for more effective practice. As the recipient of the 2015 Leonardo Fellowship, I am interested in investigating the ways in which technology continues to push education into new territories. Now more than ever, the democratization of online technologies has enabled greater access to education and the tools to create it. Learners from all over the world have access to an unprecedented amount of information and online learning tools, resulting in the emergence of new virtual learning communities and at-your-own-pace education, à la carte. On the institutional level, challenges concerning financial sustainability are being met by exploring new methodologies in the online space. This has resulted in a renaissance of sorts concerning pedagogical methods, from new approaches in distance-based learning, “flipped” classrooms, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to name a few. While the debate on taking all or part of college education online has been met with critics on both sides, many believe that we are only just starting to feel the impact, and the “potential to disrupt - on price, technology, and even pedagogy”, in an industry which has in large been stagnant. My fellowship project is called “Future Learners: Re-imagining Models for Teaching Art, Science and Technology,” and will be published as an online supplement to Leonardo. As part of my fellowship, I will also be curating blog articles related to the subject and surrounding topics. I’m looking forward to sharing not only my own thoughts on the subject, but also inviting other artists, researchers, and academics to share their insights on the subject though this blog here and the final published online supplement to Leonardo.