Jamming, Technology and Learning

July, 2001

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Jamming is one of the highlights of musical performance. Musicians, each competent players in their own right, join together in spontaneous improvisation around a common theme. Often musicians who've never even met get together for the first time in front of a large audience and play off of each other as they create a beautiful interpretation of a number that was never played that way before, and will likely not be played that way again.

While commonly associated with the arts (especially music), the principles of jamming can be applied to the challenges faced in life, on the job, and even to the study of academic subjects. Furthermore, jamming can lead to new insights and new ways of approaching a problem that takes everyone by surprise. In the educational domain, jamming can be applied to many subjects, just as musicians jam around many musical forms (in my college days I even jammed with friends on themes by Bach!) And, just as most musicians jam on musical themes with instruments, learners can jam on academic themes with technology, especially with some of the peer-to-peer technologies that are just coming to market. Before getting into that level of detail, I want to talk about some of the key elements of a jam session.

Jamming requires more than one person. Even if you are jamming with a pre-recorded piece of music, it took others to set the background on which you can lay your improvisation.

Jamming follows rules. Musicians agree on the key in which they will be playing, the tempo, and the overall structure of the music, if not the name of a piece of music that will serve as the framework for the session.

Everyone helps everyone else. I was listening to a jazz performance one day in which the trumpet player had migrated into another key and forgot which key to return to. The sax player played a harmonizing riff in the trumpet player's key and then gently led him back home to the astounded delight of the audience.

Everyone gets to solo. While the overall process involves group collaboration, each member is expected to contribute a unique element that requires everyone else to pick up on the lead and follow it wherever it goes.

Jamming goes new places. The creativity involved in improvisation in a group setting virtually guarantees that new ideas will emerge that would not be thought of by any member in isolation.

Jamming builds rapport. Every time the members of our blues band (the Bluesmen of the Silicon Delta) get together for rehearsal, we also spend time just "noodling around". These free-form jam sessions have led to some new riffs that we incorporate in our performances, and even have resulted in a new song. The ease with which we play with each other is reflected in our personal relationships as well. When you jam with someone, you know that person in a deep way.

There are other rules, I'm sure, but these can set the stage for jamming with technology in support of learning. For example, if student teams are exploring a topic, my guess is that any teacher would be happy if, in addition to learning history (for example), the students worked well as a group, followed rules carefully, each student helped other group members, yet showed his or her own creative contribution, explored the topic in a new way, and built rapport among the group. In other words, the teacher would be happy if the students jammed.

How would a jam session on an academic session look? It would start with a topic (this would be the inspiration for the session) such as the battle of New Orleans. To get started, everyone in the group needs to know the original "piece". Once everyone is up to speed on the basic facts, the team can start to jam with the ideas around this event. For example, this tragic battle was fought after the war was over. Why did this happen? What role did communication technology play? Could this ever happen again? These questions (among others) could form the basis of academic "riffs" that each member of the team could expand upon, with the rest of the team providing backup. Finally, the team would want to create a final "performance" of their session -- perhaps exploring the event from a first person perspective of people on both sides of the conflict. The important point is that there is no hard and fast formula for creating a jam session. Each group in a class might approach the same topic from a completely different perspective. What they would all have in common is a solid grounding in the topic being studied, plus a demonstration that they could extend their knowledge themselves through collaboration.

As I said, there are technological tools that can be used in support of jamming. To understand why these emergent tools are so powerful, let's look at some of the older technologies such as the Web.

The Web is powerful. Until recently it was the fastest growing communication technology in history (since eclipsed by peer-to-peer technologies we'll explore next). But as powerful as the Web is, it has its limitations. For one thing, it uses a client-server model in which the information to be accessed is stored on a server using a client program in the user's computer such as Microsoft Explorer or Netscape Communicator. To download information from the Web, the user has only to go to a site and click a mouse button. Posting information, on the other hand, is a much more complicated process. The result is that the Web is used more as an informational resource than as a place to share information among peers.

Peer-to-peer applications, on the other hand, operate very differently. It is as easy to post ideas as it is to download them. Peer-to-peer applications like Groove (www.groove.net) foster collaboration by allowing small groups to create personalized workspaces with places for agendas, shared files, chat windows, shared whiteboards, and a variety of other facilities that groups are likely to need as they work together. Because each client connects directly to the others in the group (rather than through a central server), everyone's workspace is automatically synchronized with the others so that any work done off-line is spontaneously shared when the connection is made. Student projects can be worked on off-line, and group meetings can be handled over the Internet whenever it is convenient for the team members to connect with each other. For geographically dispersed teams, peer-to-peer applications create an environment for intellectual jamming that gets the mechanics of the technology out of the way, and lets the creative ideas flow through. Once a project is completed, the team can generate a final "performance" in whatever form makes the most sense — a paper, a hypermedia document, etc. — and then hand it in.

Of course, collaboration over the Internet is not new; it dates back to the founding of the Internet itself. In fact, we may come to see our romance with the Web as a brief excursion away from the symmetric communication medium the Internet was designed to foster.

Again, don't disparage the Web. As a resource for posting information for wide dissemination it is perfect. I remember how painful informational research was prior to the rise of the Web. But the Web has not evolved into a powerful tool for peer-to-peer communication. For this we are getting new tools, tools that will foster new educational applications, the rise of project-based learning, and the chance for learners of all ages to jam on great ideas!

Copyright, © 2001, Thornburg Center. All Rights Reserved.