A Computer Taught Me to Play Guitar!

Did you hear the one about the guitarist who learned how to play from a book? Sadly his career was ruined by a misprint! Well now there is a computer program, a development of the Guitar Hero game, that offers a course in how to play the guitar. Unfortunately I have never played Guitar Hero, so most of the description is lost on me. The closest I have gotten to anything like this is the scene in Lost in Translation where Scarlett Johansson is wandering around in a Tokyo video arcade and sees this guy playing what I assume is Guitar Hero. Here is a video clip about the method:

I have to admit that I dipped in and out--I have a short attention span for this sort of thing--but I did notice some things that seem appropriate. There is a feature, riff repeater, that allows you to isolate a particular short, difficult passage for practice. Well, of course, this is how you learn stuff, by breaking it down into small, easily-digested parts. So maybe this might actually facilitate learning guitar. It might even be an improvement over your local rock guitar teacher who is likely an inarticulate dweeb.

The impact of the possibilities offered by computer software and the internet on teaching is probably just in the very early stages. There are a whole bunch of mediocre guitar teachers, piano teachers, instructors in business and sales and, a particularly ripe target, college professors, who have hanging over their heads, whether they realize it or not, the sword of Damocles. The MOOCs (massive open online courses) just starting to be offered by universities, are going to have a huge impact on the institutions of higher learning who have been going down the road of less for more for a long time. Tuitions are skyrocketing as undergraduates find themselves more and more stuffed into huge lecture classes of 300 or more students with a once-a-week session in a smaller group with a grad student. Replacing this with an online course would likely be an improvement!

A couple of little anecdotes from my experience. In the early 70s I was an undergraduate in a Western Canadian university where I was lucky to get an excellent introduction to a university education. Apart from music I had classes in linguistics, English, German and philosophy. Each of these classes, at the first-year level, had no more than twenty students. The philosophy class in particular was taught by a recent PhD and he did it by assigning readings and then debating them with us. In other words, we actually did philosophy in the class in much the same way that Socrates would have in the 4th century BC. Years later I became an instructor myself in that same university and was shocked to discover that that same first year philosophy class now had 300 students! There won't be any debating in that class! Another example. In another university where I was teaching a music appreciation class to non-music majors, with an enrollment of around 100 students, I was waiting outside with a group of students for the previous course to end when I fell into conversation with one of my students. As we walked in a few minutes later she confided in me that she was in 2nd year psych and just now was the first time she had actually spoken to a professor. Now I was just a sessional lecturer, but I got the point. Universities have, in many respects, turned from being transmitters of the great traditions of Western culture into sausage-factories, turning out certified know-nothings in great quantity. It wouldn't be quite so insulting if it were not that the cost of this has become prohibitive--in the US at least. Canadian universities are still pretty cheap, though with a lot of the same problems.

All this makes universities a big fat target for internet instruction.