In the 21st century, learning new skills and hobbies is an evolving and individualized process. Over the last few weeks, I have been tasked to learn a new hobby/skill from my Network Learning Project (NLP). One of the main stipulations with this project is that all the resources that I use to learn my hobby MUST come from online sources. I was not allowed to use people that I know or engage a professional to assist me in some fashion.

As I express in my initial NLP blog post, I have never had the opportunity or ability to play an instrument, and as I had gotten a ukulele for Christmas a few years back, I decided that I would take this opportunity to finally learn how to play it. Specifically, I decided to learn how to play “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presely.

I started out just by looking up what notes and tabs I would need to learn to actually play the song. Luckily, Ukutabs was an amazing resource which not only had a list of the tabs I would need to learn but also the order they came up in the song. However this did not help me as I had quite a bit of trouble actually transitioning from one tab to another, as learning the finger placement was difficult from just the text and image based website. Luckily, I was able to find a number of YouTube videos which were able to clarify how to best place fingers and transition from one tab to another. One in particular that comes to mind is a tutorial by Cythia Lin Music, which shows a step by step breakdown of transitions throughout the whole song

Overall, I found this an interesting experience. The process of self education is a daunting one and requires a lot of patience and commitment, both things that I can find myself lacking when something does not come easily to me. In addition, this method of learning really only works in specific situations. For example, a decent chunk of the world’s population does not have access to the internet, as expressed by Aleph Molinari’s TEDTalk, and as such, would not have the ability to consider this method. Additionally, when looking at how we are using resources such as the internet, my mind goes back to Winner and his ideas around the politics of different types of technology. While I do not imagine the creators of Ukutabs or Guitar Tuna (the app I use to tune my ukulele) thought about the systematic racism inherent in the technologies we use, it is nonetheless present (Winner, 1980). Students in the inner city, like the ones I work with, could likely only use this method of learning at school, where they have consistent internet access, and may have a hard time exploring the internet based model independently. 

I feel uncertain about my future with Network Learning as a whole at this point. On one hand, I think exploiting the resources available from the internet to increase one’s own learning is invaluable and would never say that one should not use every resource available. However, I personally feel that just using the internet is limiting, and find myself thinking about my coworker who teaches music, who offered to teach me ukulele when he heard that I was learning it for grad school. As is often the case, I feel that finding a balance between independent learning/resources and community driven, traditional learning could provide the best outcomes. I think that after this course I will ask my coworker for some lessons and tips on playing the ukulele and try to compare that experience to my NLP and try to take the best of both moving forward. 

My complete list of resources and sites are listed here.

References: 

Molinari, A. (2012). Let's bridge the digital divide! [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/aleph_molinari_let_s_bridge_the_digital_divide

Thür, C. (2020). Guitartuna: Online guitar tuner for acoustic, electric and Bass. GuitarTuna | Online Guitar Tuner for Acoustic, Electric and Bass. https://yousician.com/guitartuna 

UkuTabs. (2022, September 1). Ukulele chords diagrams & ukulele fretboard • ukutabs. UkuTabs. https://ukutabs.com/ukulele-chords-diagrams/ 

Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, 1980, pp. 121–136, http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/stable/20024652.

YouTube. (2017). Can’t Help Falling in Love - fingerpicking // Ukulele Tutorial. YouTube. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxWLCu2_pMk&ab_channel=CynthiaLinMusic.