The early days of developing digital learning objects were fraught with frustration. Every application had its own file format. Nothing would talk to anything else. And every new program would make the material produced by the old programs look dull and drab by comparison. So every new semester we’d be rewriting the material that we developed last semester. Even now, with radically improved file compatibility, many educators feel that in order to put something fresh and lively in front of their students they need to trash last year’s stuff and start all over again.

David Wallace, a Distinguished Apple Educator based in Webb City, Missouri, says that its time to put a stop to this rampant reinvention, and he showed us how in his IDG Macworld workshop, Garage Band 08 in Education: Remix your Media. David says that we should instead be repurposing and enhancing those learning objects, and he says that Apple’s Garage Band is the perfect application to do it. Garage Band, he says, is both powerful and intuitive; no other application – on any platform – quite matches it in functionality, and just about anyone can use it.

But this, importantly, is not just about saving curriculum development time for educators. As David explains in this interview with Ian Green, giving this ethos of reuse a pivotal place in your educational practice makes for greater engagement and greater empowerment for learner and educator alike. Read more about this interesting work on David’s GarageBand: Recycle, Reuse, Remix pages, which can be found within the Apple Learning Interchange site, a rich source for material on the educational uses of Garage Band and other Apple programs and systems.

Listen to this postscript: The editing obsession
Postscript: I ended the main interview with David with a comment about my amateurish audio editing skills, a throwaway remark that started another conversation about spontaneity, coherence and the dangers of getting obsessed with editing. We thought this conversation was worth sharing, so have also included the audio file here.