What the One-Laptop-Per-Child movement and many online guitar courses have in common
Unlimited possibilities and not enough structure.
Here’s a great story about the One-Laptop-Per-Child movement that started in 2005.
Despite being lauded by governments, the media, and the public as an obvious winner, the program failed. The failure came only partly from the poor quality of the product, but mostly from the assumption that if children had access to technology, they would know what to learn and be able to teach themselves to do it. In fact, only the children who were encouraged by caretakers and enthusiastic teachers to make something interesting or learn new skills used them for creation, not just consumption.
There are many parallels to music technology.
Here are some common questions:
“Should I start with JustinGuitar or Guitartricks?”
“What’s the best app to learn guitar?”
“Who should I follow to learn theory?”
It’s common to spend too much time thinking about these questions, finally getting started, only to move onto something else without actually getting any better.
Like the OLPC movement, the assumption of a lot of content creators is that as long as they present the information, everyone who wants to can find it and become fabulously competent guitarists. But the reality is this: technology is only one part of learning the guitar. The other part is being able to just pick something and stick with it.
In 2021, people are spoiled for choice when it comes to high quality education.
The question is if you can develop the skills and knowledge to actually learn something useful.
And in lieu of enthusiastic teacher to encourage you, do you have a systematic way of improving at guitar on which you can rely on yourself? It doesn’t matter if the chord diagram is hand written, from a beautiful engraving software, or shown with a karaoke bubble bouncing over it, it’s still an abstraction.
And the work of a thriving guitarist is to take that abstract representation and make it a reality.
So much content requires a new skill: focusing on a few things while avoiding distraction
That's why I like the new approach to practice I've been using.
I usually choose songs or one-off video lessons to create projects out of, but it works for all kinds of content. By creating projects, you're forced to choose a finite amount of material to work with (I usually do 2 or 3 projects a month) and any time you come across a new, shiny lesson, you save it to be looked at later instead of dropping everything to start something new.
I've definitely spent time learning something only to drop it, never look at it again, and not be any better as a result.
What the One-Laptop-Per-Child movement and many online guitar courses have in common
This is very good and also very insightful. Re-trying ideas that failed in the past is like repeating history.
How many kids got new tablets or Chromebooks for school in the past 19 months? How many people working from home used Zoom after hearing about it for the first time? When the dust finally settles on the past two years are we going to be any better off?
Access to technology is better now than any other time in history. It’s the lack of a plan on how to use it that keeps us stuck in reverse. We don’t need any more masterclasses. They are just another marketplace for consumption. In spite of all the technology available to us, we need teachers and teaching as much as we ever did.