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Classification:
Educational music-oriented collaborative environments
Country:
Description:
The Sonic Postcards project is an international school project which provides structured activities concerning digital audio processing and including a portal for sharing the results. The project involved about 160 schools in England, mainly primary schools, but also secondary schools and music schools. Sonic Postcard is currently developing a program of international cooperation.
Target Group:
Sonic Postcards started in 2004 as a national education programme, with the aim of enabling pupils from across the UK to explore and compare their local sound environments through the composition and exchange - via the internet - of sound postcards with other schools.
Ha coinvolto circa 160 scuole in Inghilterra, principalmente scuole primarie, ma anche scuole medie e scuole di musica.
Sonic Postcards is currently developing a programme of international collaboration. So far six projects have taken place, in partnership with the British Council; four projects in Chongqing, China with two schools, Numerb 11 Middle School and Shanhu Primary School, and two projecsy in Barcelona with CEIP Dolors Monserda Santapau.
Technology:
MAIN PORTAL: Custom code written in PHP
TOOLS:
- Audio playback: Javascript player
- Interactive sound toys: Adobe Flash
- Off line: The project endorses the use of the following freeware tools
- Audacity for editing wav files. (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)
- LAME lib for conversion of mp3s (http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php)
- AudioMulch for composition and performance: (http://www.audiomulch.com)
COMMENTS: The main project portal can be viewed on all devices, but the Flash components cannot be viewed on mobile devices and require users to make regular updates.
Source: This information comes from a conversation with the site author
Usability and Accessibility:
Sonic Postcards, an original concept of inviting British schools to combine sound and images in order to create multi-dimensional ‘soundscapes’ and share them on the web, is introducing several usability issues because of the very nature of the creative process required from the users. Sonic Postcards includes two fields of digital creation: image and sound. Even though the descriptive material and the guidance offered to educators is fairly comprehensive and detailed (‘Teacher Pack’), it requires from both the teachers and the students the understanding and mastery of multiple digital tools (software and hardware) in order to fully exploit the platform. Furthermore, the recommended tools are all external to the website and may lead to a fragmented user experience. However, this learning process of the creative tools being advocated as one of the main objectives of the Sonic Postcards project, it must be acknowledged here as a beneficial feature.
Our main concern in regard to accessibility is the technology (or lack of) used for the sharing process of the postcards. The portal doesn’t seem to offer automated uploading features, and does not offer the option to add description and introduction to the creations. As far as the documentation seems to explain, sharing a postcard is done by sending isolated files (mp3, images, etc.) to an email address. Another accessibility concern is the superabundance of text (descriptions and guidance), which compete directly with the multimedia content of the portal, and thereby diminishes the community dimension of Sonic Postcards.
