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Classification:
Educational music-oriented collaborative environments
Country:
Description:
It provides teachers, educators, students, professional operators tools to communicate (users community, forum, groupware), learn (teaching and learning pathways, formative materials and papers), collaborate and exchange (a web enviroment for the project management, WebCollab, and a repository where upload and download projects).
Target Group:
The project started to experiment alternative educational activities in schools of all levels, with particular attention to music conservatories, music schools and vocational schools, primarily Italian. The presence of bilingualism has subsequently facilitated the formation of a community at a international level which has over 1500 members from 97 countries. The most present countries are the United States and Italy.
Technology:
MAIN PORTAL: Joomla 1.0 (PHP SQL, LAMP)
TOOLS:
- Social networking & Subscription Management software: Community builder (Joomla extension)
- Forum: Fireboard (Joomla extension)
- Collaborative project management: Webcollab (http://webcollab.sourceforge.net/)
- Repository: DOCman (Joomla extension)
Source: This information was derived from an inspection of the site.
Usability and Accessibility:
In direct filiation with Musinet, NetMusic shares the same aims as its predecessor, but does it in a more user-friendly and structured way. Using familiar and solid technology (Joomla), the menu structure and the general navigation on the portal is fluid and natural. The different sections of the portal are organized following user-oriented areas of interest, such as a teacher area, a student area, a community, an information sheet on the project, etc. The main negative concern we have regarding NetMusic is its community feature, mostly because of its impersonal profiles due perhaps to the lack of music-related descriptive fields.
The amount of information offered on NetMusic seems equivalent or perhaps superior to what was available on Musinet, but its access is benefitting tremendously from a better organized navigation and link structure, as well as highly efficient Joomla web design elements which are in phase with a standardized web user-experience.
