In some ways this reflection feels summative though it shouldn’t as I plan on pursuing my ukulele skills for many years.  The instrument is flexible and portable and I can see myself using it within many different contexts.  As such, I’ll let the nature of this reflection perform similar to a book chapter ending knowing that future chapters won’t be nearly so documented as the first.  This said, however, I would like to continue to post occasional video and audio recordings of my performances—both personal and private—on sites like YouTube so my progress can at least be loosely tracked.

Knowing that there are so many computer-assisted instruction sites currently on the internet both excites and concerns me.  I’m excited as I can learn just about anything and it’s often not hard to find good quality instructional sites.  I’m concerned, however, in that anyone with a computer, webcam and web access and throw up an instructional program and the quality of the program can be less than satisfactory.

I am pleased with the instruction offered from the Uke School.  It delivered lessons in small, manageable chunks giving helpful tools to guide my learning process.  Along the way it stated lessons would be easy, the student should stay the course so as not to run into problems later.

The portfolio served as a progress and presentation platform.  The progress platform was helpful in that I could easily see how I was improving and the presentation platform was useful in that I subjected my playing to a wider audience with the hope that I would receive feedback.  Feedback, unfortunately, was rather limited both in quantity and quality.  Since I presented my learning videos through Facebook and YouTube, I received more comments than I had anticipated.

Feedback received via Facebook:

“I love it Andrew! Encore!”, “good for you, Andrew,”, “Dad and I give you an A+. Good job.”, “Wow, you've become a pro in such a short time.”, “Bravo - great rendition! One chord was off, but you know that already : )”, “Cara's favourite song! Good singing and playing”, and “Wild strumming”.

Feedback received via YouTube:

“Not sure what you expected, but it was great. I think you should get one of those beaded sound-hole straps from musicguymic on ebay. Might give you more control when you have to play standing up--less chance of the ukulele slipping away.”  This was much more helpful.
While the feedback increased my musical self esteem, it did little to better my ukulele skills.  Feedback to better my skills would have been welcome.  And I think that is the biggest drawback to a computer assisted course like this—the material is presented extremely well, though with any sort of instruction that contains many skill layers (e.g. picking, strumming, etc.), more continuous feedback would be a huge asset.

Check out my final audio file of Still in the files section or access it here.