Suazo,+Frances

= = =Frances Suazo's Design Project = 

**Design Idea**
I plan on creating a PLE (personal learning environment) on the music of Latin America. I hope to help learners differentiate the sounds of Latin America and become familiarized with the history behind the music. After participation, I hope that learners can use some of the basic recognition techniques to differentiate the music and recognize and participate in the the dances in social or ballroom settings. I anticipate that my SSLE will be similar to the one about Thailand under SSLE Resources in terms of look and feel. I found the following SSLEs on the music of Latin America which can help guide my research:

[|Darien's Music Department Latin American Music Project]

[|Music of Latin America]

Audience
My audience are Latin American Studies students and Latin music enthusiasts (musicians/dancers/scholars). My PLE would provide general information in one place since Latin America is quite large and there are many types of music, not just the ones recently popularized on radio and television. I might have to select some countries to focus (perhaps the most popular or the ones with standardized ballroom steps). By being able to read about the history, watch the dance and even follow along, learners can gain basic knowledge of the Latin music form of their choice. My PLE will not follow a standard schedule, so users can participate at their leisure. My audience will join because with Web 2.0 tools, I will make different types of music always available and update information on a blog. I expect my audience to be mostly non-Latinos who lack basic knowledge of Latin American music who are interested in exploring the music to perhaps take a dance class or travel.

Since my SSLE will be public, I anticipate a large audience with some of the following characteristics:  I anticipate for the members of my audience to be active, open-minded and obviously technically-saavy and to use the internet as a preliminary research tool.
 * High school/college student conducting research on the music of Latin America for a class assignment
 * Latin American Studies students conducting research on the music of Latin America for a class assignment
 * Prospective ballroom/social dancing students conducting research to narrow down their choices at the time of registration
 * Prospective travelers or those who traveled in the past to a Latin American country who wish to continue exploring the music to which they were introduced during their visit

Content
My audience will learn about the history of the music of Latin America, learn the characteristics of the music and learn about the dances. Participation in an SSLE is a good way to acquire this knowledge since it is provided free of charge and my PLE will give them a context for this music which is becoming increasingly popular. As a frequent participant in ballroom dancing, I've been able to observe that many students in this classes cannot distinguish the music since they've been unexposed to it. Once students can recognize and appreciate the different styles and their respective dances, they can choose to explore these styles further with classes or through travel. I hope to organize the content sources by country so that students can pick and choose according to their interests. I anticipate using audio and video to present most of the content. I don't anticipate copyright issues since most of the sites that I will probably link to allow this for educational purposes. I don't specifically remember the audio requirements but for music, in past jobs, I was allowed to use 33% of a song without a problem. I'll have to do more research on this.

Format
I plan to use Netvibes as my base tool and will organize the PLE by country. Since what we need is a prototype I wonder if I'll be able to populate every since tab since I would like every country represented (15 total) to have the same kind of information so that it is balanced.

I plan to include a to-do list on every tab to better organize the information (and so users can have a sense of completion if they only research one country). I'm hoping to include a radio station feed so that users can sample the music per country, access to podcasts, blogs and instructional videos.

Since my audience will be so wide and it is unlikely that many users will coincide in their use of this SSLE, I chose a PLE so that it is not driven by the collaboration/communication with others (self-paced/individual).

The topic that I chose is not necessarily time-driven but I've located blogs and events which will contribute to content aggregation as well as podcasts and hopefully microblogging (for nationwide events updates).

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Evaluate & Refine
<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive;">I think that a user can meet the learning goals by completing the pieces in each module. It is obvious that the home page is the most comprehensive and that users who choose to just complete it will get a good overall idea and understanding of the music of Latin America. The country pages are contain small pieces which facilitate an understanding of a specific country's genre. I wonder if students need a history link in the country pages (one from the home page) to understand how the country's music has evolved throughout the years.

One of the issues that my peer brought up was the inclusion of the same pieces on each page. I've had a hard time locating some information on countries with music that is mostly folkloric and not as popular. So you'll notice a dearth of information on Peru, Bolivia and Chile, for example. My peer also mentioned arranging the pages in a similar manner, which I'm considering although some widgets look better with certain layout.

In future versions of this SSLE, I might remove the country pages and instead focus on genres since many countries share them. For example, we usually attribute salsa to Puerto Rico, but Colombians have created their own unique style and so has the Dominican Republic. That would allow me to better organize the information and to not feel like I'm not providing enough for countries that have less of a recording industry and international appeal. I might consider doing this before the final presentation.