This summer a fantastic new service swept through the online world, creating one of the fastest-growing social communities we’ve seen to date. The service is Turntable.fm, and exciting social music platform that lets its users. The service combines the familiarity of a group chatroom with the social experience of DJing music for your friends.

What makes Turntable.fm so alluring, bringing users to the site in droves and keeping many there for hours at a time? The short answer is this: social interaction. With up to five DJs taking turns dropping tunes – either from the extensive TT.fm library or uploaded from their own computer – each room turns into a model of what happens (or used to happen) when a group of friends gets together to share new music that they’ve heard. And with each room also having a chat room, all parties are connected real-time not only by the music, but also through life communication.

And feedback is built in. Not only can a room weigh in via the chat what they think of a song, but there is also a voting mechanism where members of a room can designate a song either “Lame” or “Awesome,” with enough Lame votes pushing the room on to the next track.

What this means for higher education

With the trend seeing more and more learners taking advantage of distance learning, educators have been experimenting with ways to share, communicate and collaborate in that space. The great thing about TT.fm is how well it does each of these things. And it achieves them by way of an intuitive user interface that just about any new user can figure out with very little (if any) direction.

The gamification of TT.fm is another aspect of the service that can be explored in the world of distance education. Each user, or DJ, has an avatar and a profile where they collect points. Earn more points by Having users vote your song selection “Awesome” will earn you more points, which you can trade in for better avatars.

The overall result here is a localized room where people have open feedback, sharing good content is rewarded, and an open discussion of the room’s events is encouraged. It’s not hard to see how these aspects could be adapted to the virtual classroom.

Those in development of distance learning tools and protocol may want to look into these successes that Turntable.fm has enjoyed, adapting some of its features for the teacher/learner relationship. Check out this short video of a music class conducted in Turntable.fm to get a glimpse of what is possible.

Can you think of any other features that could be adapted from Turntable.fm for the world of distance education? Leave your insight in the comments.

Advertisement