CTI Music was set up in 1989, and is one of 24 subject-based centres charged with the task of working to maintain and enhance the quality of learning and increase the effectiveness of teaching through the application of appropriate learning technologies.
Last year, the Funding Councils commissioned the third (and most comprehensive) review of the CTI, in conjunction with a review of the Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network. Many of you received questionnaires about CTI Music last summer and we are grateful for the time and effort you put into making your views known to the Review Panel.
This newsletter contains a summary of the Review Group's findings, so that you can see how your responses fed into the larger process.
The major recommendation from the review was that both the CTI and the TLTSN should be wound up in their present form and replaced by a much larger and more comprehensive service to Higher Education. This new Learning and Teaching Support Network will not only provide subject-based support for disciplines which had not previously had a dedicated CTI centre; it will also provide support in wider aspects of new teaching and learning where technology may play a less significant, or at least a less obtrusive, role.
The Funding Councils have now published a Call for Bids to provide the new service, and the main features of this call are summarised later.
We in Lancaster intend to bid to be a major part of the new centre serving the Music community within the wider perspective of the study of the Performing Arts. We invite you to engage in an open discussion of the form and remit of the new centre which, though it is likely to be administered from a single institution, may well take the form of a distributed service. Details of electronic mail discussion forums are given in this newsletter but we welcome communication in any form and from all our colleagues in Music, Dance and Drama.
It is expected that the new centres will start work in January 2000. In the meantime, CTI has been granted an extension of funding to the end of this year and so the remainder of this newsletter highlights two conferences in the autumn with which we are associated. Digital Resources for the Humanities at King's College London will have a strand devoted to music scholarship, and the ALT conference later in September at Bristol is being presented in collaboration with CTI and will devote one day to subject-specific developments. I hope that we shall meet many of you at one or other of these events.
With all good wishes,
Lisa Whistlecroft