Looplabs.com: A Case Study on How to Create Smart (Learning) Environments for Generation Z
Last Saturday, I attended a wonderful meeting about music technology education at NYU’s Leslie eLab. I was delighted to see jaw-dropping innovative solutions to current educational problems developed by music scholars, engineers and entrepreneurs. Looplabs was one of them, and I immediately fell in love with it; even though it was not designed primarily for education, what I saw was an application from tomorrow’s smart learning environments.
Looplabs is an online collaborative music production platform which only requires an internet browser. Users can make beats by simply dragging and dropping shared melodies, drum loops and other audio clips?—?that‘s it! You can even record audio by simply clicking “record”. If you drag a a dissonantmelody to your song, the program automatically transposes (or shape-shifts) it based on the key you are on so that it becomes consonant. Users can share beats, recordings and songs instantly, follow each other and interact through video-chat and chat rooms. The design is so good that even an eight year-old kid can use it?—?I actually witnessed that.
I’m blown away to see how Looplabs got almost everything right about smart learning environments even though it is not designed as one! First off, it’s free, and it will be free. It promotes peer learning by promoting interaction and collaboration. It utilizes asynchronous learning by giving an option to keep sessions open and editable to other users in the cloud. It also offers tools for synchronous learning such as video chat and chat rooms. Behavior-steering upvote dynamics and follower mechanisms create an engaging competitive environment. Social media integration converts a personal practice into a social one. It doesn’t require a specific hardware or software. The whole system is built around the idea of a community so users own their experience, network and member identity. It does not offer any time frame or dictate a schedule, nor does it require a venue. Instead of offering one-size-fits-all pre-designed materials, Looplabs lets users create the content. List goes on.
From an educational standpoint, all of the qualities I mentioned above belong to smart learning environments of the future. Kudos to Craig Swannand his team for giving us a concrete idea about how to update our learning environments!
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