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(Ken) There is this one exercise that I am very found of doing on the first
day of class in music courses, which is just, as I say throwing people into
the deep end.
Listening to something with out talking about it at all and then seeing what
kind of response that I get to it.
(Ken) I am going to play a piece of... a listening example, a piece of music.
If you would please write down at least five attributes of what you hear.
Here we go, from the top.
It's about three minutes long.
[Music]
(Ken) What else?
Somebody over here, yeah.
(Students) Strong beats for two and four.
(Ken) Yes.
(Student 2) Maybe South American.
(Ken) South American, ok.
(Students 3) It sound like most the instruments being used were part of the
human body.
(Ken) People are coming to learn in this particular case about music
around the world.
I think its, in some sense, only fair to give them a taste of it from the get go.
(Jodi) A lot of them come with previous physics experience and they think
they know it all or they are afraid, because they have failed the class in the
past and so the last little bit I put in there to make physics fun, some little demos.
(Jodi) We have two cans of Campbell soup.
One of them is beef broth, em yummy!
And the other one is mushroom soup and I am going to let them roll down here
and I want you predict which one is going to win.
(Student) Beef broth will win.
(Jodi) Beef broth will win, because it is healthier?
(Student) I don't know, because beef's better.
(Jodi) Beef is better?
(Student) More dense.
(Jodi) More dense, well wait, this one weighs 10.5 ounces and this
one weights 10.5 ounces.
So come on somebody has got to vote for a mushroom.
[Laughter]
All right the vegetarians.
Ok, so here were going to go.
We are going to do our great race, ready?
And not only is their a clear winner, but it is really distinctive.
Beef broth will always win in race down hill.
(Jodi) They go very excited during those and that whole demo thing really
is quite effective on day one and there are two or three others I think I am
going to add to that for next time.
(Lorraine) I wanted everyone to realize that this is a senior level course and
it was going to take... it will take a lot of work and cooperation between all
the students in the class in order to end up with our end product, which
is a magazine.
Which is actually printed and produced and given to each of the students,
as well as, advisory board members for our department and professionals
in the industry.
It will also be submitted for competitions, design competitions and so I want
to make sure everyone was on the same page and they understood what the
course was about.
(Lorraine) Were basically going to design a magazine, ok I start teaching
this course... this is our fifth issue.
I started teaching this course six years ago.
It was ok, the second year was better.
The third year was, ah, beautiful.
Fourth year was gorgeous and actually submitted it to the Xerox pixi awards,
printing innovation with Xerox imaging, and we won the silver award for
digital books and manuals, which was great.
A great honor.
I going to show you a slide show of last... the last couple projects.
This is Scott Clausen who is now a designer down in Los Angeles and
he did a whole New York kind of Brooklyn theme.
Any one know who's that is?
Dan Little, yeah.
Who is now working for Surfers Journal, down in San Diego area.
(Lorraine) The culture of this class, typically, has been they are raring to go.
They can't wait, they know print, they know magazines, they are familiar with
the medium and so it makes it fun and know that it is the third week of the
quarter and they have just blossomed already.
So many of them are changing their senior project ideas and moving in new
directions with, you know, the medium that they had never tried before, which is
really interesting.
(Fred) I used to have a habit of trying to do too much on the first day and to
try and, you know, introduce topics in little bit too much detail.
Just remain calm, you know, give... be perhaps more engaging as opposed
to detail oriented, set hook.
(Fred) Here is an example for you.
We are going to find edges in this image.
Let me show you what I mean by that and then try and define it also.
Now this is a book that you see here over to the left and the book just happens
to have a black section, a darker section, near the binding and this mid-grey
portion on the cover a little further away from the binding.
So strictly speaking if your looking for the edges of objects this ain't an edge of
an object, ok.
But it shows up do to the edge detector.
(Fred) I like the idea of, you know, disseminating those demonstrations over the web,
so they can immediately start exploring the different techniques, even if they have
a limited understanding that, you know, might just be based on their life experience,
but they can immediately start playing around with it a little bit and get them interested.