Society

I have been an open research advocate for many years, but have not yet written much about open culture. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about the term before I came across a Creative Commons blog post. Open Culture As it turns out, “open culture” seems to be a relatively new term, also to them. The CC team shares three reasons for using the term: Open culture is readily understandable and does not include an unfamiliar acronym Open culture is broad in scope envisioning open sharing of cultural heritage as a participatory experience Open culture encapsulates the synergies between culture as heritage and as contemporary creativity Their approach appears to be mostly centered on the needs of “GLAMs”: galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. However, it is an interesting move, and it could help spread the word about the need to enhance openness. ...

Today, I decided to leave Twitter. I have been in doubt for a while; I wanted to see how the platform would develop after Musk’s take-over. Unfortunately, things have been steadily declining, and I am now at a point where I don’t want to support the company any longer. I leave the platform with mixed feelings. I have used Twitter as my primary social media platform after I decided to say Goodbye to Facebook some years ago. I have enjoyed Twitter’s short-message format, ease of use, and ability to connect with many academics, artists, and creators worldwide. ...

I am thrilled to read about RITMO in the latest Forskerforum, a magazine covering topics related to research, higher education, and academic policy in Norway. There, Ole Kristian Våge, a terminologist at the National Center for Health Terminology, comments on the titles of Centres of Excellence. His main complaint is that they all have CamelCase names with weird combinations of letters. However, he is positive about RITMO, here translated to English: But if someone from an SFF (Centre of Excellence) is interviewed by the Norwegian press, they cannot introduce themselves with FAIR. A full-form name in Norwegian is much better. Otherwise, I must say that among the abbreviations here, I really have a liking for RITMO. Even though it is inspired by the Spanish word for rhythm, it does not conflict with the Norwegian linguistic structure and reflects much of the content – rhythm and motion. This name I will remember. ...

I am presenting at the Norwegian Forskerutdanningskonferansen on Monday, which is a venue for people involved in research education. I have been challenged to talk about why open research is better research. In the spirit of openness, this blog post is an attempt to shape my argument. It can be read as an open notebook for what I am going to say. Open Research vs Open Science My first point in any talk about open research is to explain why I think “open research” is better than “open science”. Please take a look at a previous blog post for details. The short story is that “open research” feels more inclusive for people from the arts and humanities, who may not identify as “scientists”. ...

I have a commentary published in the Norwegian academic newspaper Khrono today with the title “Micro-education is the future”. The reason I ended up writing the piece was because of my frustration with working “against” the Norwegian system when it comes exploring new educational strategies. As I have written about here on the blog before, I have tested a number of different educational methods and formats over the last years, including Music Moves, Carpentry-style workshops, and, of course, our joint master’s programme Music, Communication & Technology. With all of these, I have experienced difficulties getting them registered in our course system (Felles studentsystem (FS)). For the master’s programme, we have solved this by splitting up courses on the two universities involved. This makes it possible to run the programme, but it creates some unfortunate side-effects, such that it is difficult to have non-programme students sign up for the courses. I am not going to write more about these issues here today, as I am quite confident that we are going to find “in-house” solutions to these problems. ...

I am happy to say that I have already completed my first and only new year’s resolution this year: getting rid of my Facebook account. It turned out to be much easier than expected, as there is a separate, easily accessible delete account page on Facebook. I just had to type my password and a captcha and that was it. Now my Facebook account is disabled, and will be permanently deleted after 14 days. What a relief! ...

Reading the latest issue of the Norwegian researcher’s magazine Forskerforum, I learned about PICO as an alternative model to the often used IMRAD approach to scientific writing. To summarize: IMRAD = Introduction, Method, research and Discussion PICO = Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome It seems like PICO comes from clinical practice in medicine. Not sure if this helps music research that much, but I do like the structured approach to organising paper writing.

While in Genova for the last couple weeks, I only had limited time to read and write e-mails, and now that I am back in my office I am slowly trying to get through everything that was left behind. I have found it inspiring to read some of the blog entries on e-mail handling over at 43Folders. I am now trying to be a bit harder on how much time I spend in my inbox, by following these advice: ...

I am doing some “house-cleaning” on my computer, and came across the link to the OLPC Sound Samples which were announced last month. This collection covers a lot of different sounds, ranging from the Berklee samples to sets created by people in the CSound community. Obviously, not all the 10GB is equally interesting, but the initiative is excellent, and along with the Freesound project, it makes a great resource for various projects.

On the plane down to Genova I had an interesting tactile experience. It turned out that the box that the lunch was served in had this 3D ornament of a walnut on the top cover (not so easy to represent in a picture, but you get the idea). Interesting how much this enhanced the experience! {width=“400” height=“300”}