Connexions Project officially launches

Connexions
Project officially launches

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Composer Anthony
K. Brandt is no computer guru, but thanks to Rice University’s
Connexions Project, he’s using the Internet to fulfill
a longtime dream of interweaving music and text to form
a truly interactive music appreciation course.

Brandt, an assistant
professor of composition in Rice’s Shepherd School
of Music, is one of a growing number of educators who’ve
begun exploring how to use Connexions to custom-build just
the course that they want and offer it to the world.

Four years in
development, Connexions officially launched its portal,
<http://cnx.rice.edu>,
last week. Unlike MIT’s OpenCourseWare and other initiatives
by universities to make their own course material freely
available online, Connexions offers a revolutionary approach:
a single place online where any educator in the world can
both post and use knowledge for free.

Connexions adapts
the open-source software concept to scholarly content. People
freely publish course curricula in Connexions’ “Content
Commons,” where all lessons can be used, modified or
combined with others to meet each instructor’s specific
needs. The upshot is that university professors, community
college instructors, grade school teachers, professional
development leaders, home educators and others can use,
modify and re-use one another’s course materials.

“Connexions
is a natural fit for the K-12 classroom because kids love
to use computers,” Brandt said. “I’ve already
spoken with a high school teacher here in Houston who’s
interested in using my course, and I’ve also corresponded
with a K-12 music teacher and homeschooler in Illinois who
has created a few of her own Connexions courses for elementary-age
students.”

At the university
level, Connexions courses are already used to teach engineering,
computer science, physics and mathematics classes at Rice,
the University of Illinois, Ohio State University, Cambridge
University and other schools.

“One of
the significant advantages of Connexions is that by its
very design, it encourages people to collaborate in building
a base of knowledge within a particular domain that can
be constantly updated and revised,” said Jeff Wright,
dean of the School of Engineering at the University of California
at Merced, the 10th campus of the UC system, scheduled to
open in the fall of 2005. “Connexions offers just the
kind of openness and flexibility that our faculty will embrace
as we build the first major research university in the United
States in the 21st century.”

Connexions’
authors use an “open content” license developed
by Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org)
that allows unlimited modification and distribution, provided
authors receive attribution for their work.

“Connexions
grew from the idea that the Web offered a perfect means
of making scholarly knowledge freely available to anyone,”
said Connexions Director Richard Baraniuk, an electrical
and computer engineering professor at Rice, who started
the project in order to reach out to students in his digital
signal processing class.

Supported by
Rice and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Connexions
already contains more than 1,600 educational “modules,”
each equivalent to a two- to three-page lesson from a textbook.
Developed using prototype software over the past five years,
most of these modules deal with highly technical subjects
related to the mathematics and physics of signal processing.
Modules are used by instructors to supplement or replace
textbooks. But in addition to typical textbook content,
modules can also include interactive simulations and multimedia
that enhance learning.

With the availability
of new, do-it-yourself publishing tools, Connexions is attracting
new users like Brandt, who are pioneering content beyond
engineering in disciplines like music and biology. Brandt’s
course, “Sound Reasoning” (http://cnx.rice.edu/featuredcontent),
is aimed at learners, especially those without formal music
training. He hopes the course will bridge the divide between
modern and classical music by teaching people to fully appreciate
the form and structure of all music.

The prototype
of Brandt’s course consists of seven modules, an introduction
followed by three opening lessons that are accompanied by
corresponding listening galleries. Each module contains
links to several music files, which load and play within
the page.

“At first,
I thought a CD-ROM might be the best medium,” Brandt
said. “However, when I learned about Connexions, I
realized that its flexibility, potential to grow and universal
reach made it ideal.”

Brandt said Connexions
offers the only technology he’s yet found that allows
musical examples to be interpolated into the text, where
readers can click on them and immediately hear the concepts
in action.

“That immediacy
is very powerful,” Brandt said. “‘Sound Reasoning’
is all about developing the listener’s confidence and
self-reliance. Being able to describe a concept and then
have listeners test it with their own ears is the strongest
way to teach music appreciation.”

To explore the
Content Commons and find out how to post lessons, create
courses and teach students using Connexions, visit <http://cnx.rice.edu>.