Room With A View

I’ve been thinking about the audio school folks that all talked about the need to be entrepreneurial. The days of working one’s way up in the hierarchy of record companies is gone. The life of an audio engineer is now about business and contracts. In short they need to be self-employed. I imagine it’s the same for people working in the movie industry too.

My concern is that I don’t see schools–at least international schools–preparing kids to be self-employed. Schools should not follow business models. Nor do I think the role of schools is just to prepare kids to be good employees but I do think they should have enough business savvy at the end of high school that they have the confidence and skills that they can start the process of becoming self-employed. I suspect that most teachers–myself included–do not have the skills or the knowledge to teach this but it still needs to be done.

My family and I spent Thursday going around Vancouver checking on audio schools for my son. He graduates from ISB in a year and plans to be a rock star but he’s thinking about picking up some audio engineering skills along the way. We stopped in at three schools–Nimbus, Pacific Audio Visual Institute, and Columbia Academy. Each school had strengths but some common themes that emerged from all of them were:

• The technology is secondary. One has to have an ear for music/audio.
• The technology is always changing. One has to always be learning.
• People skills are as important as technical skills–maybe more so.
• One has to be entrepreneurial. There’s no job security.

Regarding music and video in schools many of my discussions with kids seem to be about what they can’t do. They can’t copy music because it’s illegal. They can’t use a video or music clip in a podcast project because we don’t have rights to re-broadcast the media. It’s extrememly limitting and for many teachers it means they don’t publish students’ media projects on our website or through other channels i.e. YouTube.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.