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What's ONADIME?
Onadime Composer is a software tool kit for making multi-media, multi-sensory real time interactive computer programs called Onadime Compositions for teaching, learning and entertainment.
When my daughter was called "learning disabled," we had to invent ways to learn that fit different minds. One daughter got As and Bs. The other got Cs and Ds in the 2nd grade. The younger was diagnosed "learning disabled," but both were sharp around the house. On news, gossip, and solving problems, they were different but equal. But in spelling practice, the younger said, "Daddy I can't do that. I'm dumb." Dumb? Where did she get that? Her teacher said she was dumb. Why? Because she was not spelling at grade level. This was different from my time in school. I was a slow speller. When my Mom went down to see what she could do, the Principal of the school, a Mr. Taylor, said, "Don't worry Mrs. Mitchell. He'll have a secretary."
Exotic biases of institutions and people are probably inescapable in this world. I have never had a secretary and my daughter is not dumb. You just have to figure out how to get around these biases in life. For me, they invented the computer and spell check. Could the computer help my daughter? She could memorize a Madonna song off the radio in one hearing, get the emotional intonation right, and then invent a dance to go with it. What if we put sensors on her hands as she danced? What if we fed motion data into a computer and transformed her hand motion into music? I knew there were MIDI music instruments in computers. I was sure we could send in data to make musical notes. I knew there were music scoring programs that could write out her music. Could the school be made to see her differently if she took in her music written out, and played them a recording she created? Could this lead the school to see her differently, and counteract the gratuitous slander of the "I'm dumb" self-image?
If she did not like what she heard when she moved her hand, she had to be able to feel her way instantly toward sounds she liked better. In the first prototype, it was as if musical notes filled the room. A stream of high piano notes might be found above her right shoulder, while drum beats in a Latin style might be near her left knee. (Down the road, sound placement varied in different Onadime Compositions.) It was as if notes lived in an "Onadime environment" of music that was inserted into the air of the "real" room. Each note could be a new discovery. Each sequence could contain surprises. The poet Theodore Roethke had a saying: "I wake, and take my waking slow; I learn by going where I have to go." In this case in Onadime, you learn by going where you want to go.
In watching moving hands create music, it became clear something deeper than just making music was going on. A hand moved. New experience was created. The unknown was explored. New events became memories. Learning happened. Experience became a form of knowledge. It was as if for every person, in any direction attention could be directed, there was what they knew, then what they did not yet know. In Onadime, the unknown could be as close as a new hand motion, and as intriguing as music. Anyplace attention could go where the known faded into the unknown came to feel like a "beach of awareness." There, consciousness could explore the unknown, much as someone at a regular beach could check out the surf. These beaches we called "frontiers of perception" (see: www.fopi.org). Everyone had them. The map of their array was more deeply individual than a fingerprint. One's interests, one's skills, one's fixations, one's dreams, one's psychology, one's habits, one's intuition, one's fears and hopes all led to frontiers of perception in daily life.
Through Onadime, simple acts, like hand motions, can take people to their frontiers of perception. One key to lifelong learning seemed to be teaching competence on one's frontiers of perception. Onadime Compositions mapping hand motion to music were a beginning. They were great for "kinesthetic learners" –those who learn by moving. But they excited everyone who used them. Onadime Composer's strength is that it can make Onadime Compositions that aim attention at almost any frontier of perception: in math, or music, or in any situation that can be represented as real time interactive experience. These Compositions can help teachers be effective by teaching specifics of required subject matter (see the Pythagorean Theorem example, below).
At the same time, with teacher guidance, each Composition can teach competence on the student's frontiers of perception. This enables students to ask questions, such as, "I know what it feels like when I am learning, and it is not happening now. Could you please say that in a different way so I can get it?" Such engagement actually makes the teacher's job easier, because new facts can then be plugged with some integrity into the student's growing mental map of the world. Passing tests then becomes part of becoming a person competent to deal with life in a world of accelerating change, where noticing what's new to you can be critical to survival, well-being, love, friendship, productive work and the tasks of any citizen in guiding community and country to a better future.
What Onadime Does
With "drag and drop" mouse motions in Onadime Composer, the computer can be instructed to respond to people and events, and make communications that are impossible via pen, paintbrush, still pictures, guitar, string quartet, calculator, spreadsheet, word processor or movie. Onadime contributes to a new medium of interactive, multimedia, multi-sensory communication.
Onadime works a little like your brain. It takes in live data streams much as your brain takes in sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. But Onadime allows you to decide what data streams to use, how they interact, and what they become.
In buzzwords, Onadime Composer is a "real time synesthesia engine." Voice can become color. Motion can become music. You can speak piano, paint with song, or play a symphony with your mouse. You can transform movies by the way music moves, or bring the Pythagorean Theorem alive for visual learners. The Pythagorean Compositions make teaching easier and learning math accessible to people for whom multiplication tables are as interesting as a trip to jail.
Pythagoras on Visual Frontiers of Perception: Onadime as a Dynamic Aid to Teaching
In Composer there is one simple rule: Anything red can be linked to anything blue. Drag a red name and drop it on a blue name. A green link is made. Red then drives blue through green links. "What you see is what you get" goes live in Onadime. If you download the demo of Onadime Composer from the Onadime web site (www.onadime.com), you can easily link your mouse to the colored shape as shown above and get going.
The Pythagorean Theorem CompositionsIn the first Pythagorean Composition, a Triangle with three squares on its sides is manipulated with the mouse. The Triangle's size and position change the mouse moves. The areas of the Squares shrink and grow as the sides of the Triangle change. The Pythagorean relation between the length of the sides of the Triangle and the size of the Squares is visually demonstrated WITHOUT ANY MATH.
The constant relationship between the length of the sides of the triangle and the areas of the squares becomes obvious to the visual learner. This can communicate the general nature of an equation as a relationship that stays constant while its content changes. A fundamental principle of math and science can thus be communicated: there exist constant relationships in the midst of change. Onadime makes this general concept of the equation visually accessible along with the specifics of the Pythagorean relationships.
In the next step, the math of Pythagoras is added as a language for communicating about relationships that are constant, though their content may change. When the mouse moves, the triangle and squares move and the numbers in the equations change. That the math represents the visually accessible situation becomes obvious.
In the next step, math is introduced as a tool for solving problems, as in finding the length of the hypotenuse. The notion of "square root" becomes visually accessible.
Much of Trigonometry and Calculus are suited to real time interactive presentations in Onadime. Science experiments' live data can be pumped into Onadime. The results can be represented interactively in Onadime, to communicate results to experimenters, and to propagate them through the educational system as interactive teaching compositions.
Audio and visual/video design, theater and drama design and stagecraft, multimedia in general, and the new field of real time computing, can be taught with hands-on immediacy. Onadime can export live video for use in video editing programs like After Effects, Premiere or Final Cut, or use clips from those programs. It can export and import still pictures -from or to- Photoshop. As Composition elements, Onadime can use live video, canned video, QuickTime movies, MPEG movies, any still graphics (you can use any of your own pictures or visual material), has its own computer graphics and has full MIDI in and out and sensor data processing.
For more information, go to www.onadime.com
The range and scope of Compositions that can be created is practically limitless. The number of uses goes well beyond what Onadime Inc. and its talented people can think up. For this reason, we have given considerable thought to distribution of Onadime Compositions by all Onadime Composer users through the Onadime World Sail program. Today's global economic downturn slows economic capacity to act. Education is among the first budgets to be cut. My own state of Washington today has a 2.5 billion dollar budget deficit. What does it mean? Teachers' salaries cut. Class size increases. Less attention to each student. Can Onadime do anything to be of use in this situation?
Onadime would like to make free copies of Onadime Composer available to the first 50 K-12 schools/teachers visiting the Learning Horizons web site who express interest in and capacity to use Onadime constructively. Budget cuts are sure to mean that money to teach people of diverse learning styles will be cut. But computer skills education will retain high priority. Onadime represents the cutting edge of real time interactive computing and the next paradigm shift in human communication. Using Onadime, real time interactive computing can be taught. But what are the lesson plans and exercises to be? Here is the key. Education for a changing world must introduce people to life on their own frontiers of perception. How? By getting them to notice how they notice what's new to them. How does this new perception contribute to their capacity to understand events and processes? If students and teachers think of the ways their own learning works, and make Onadime Compositions that communicate their way of learning to like-minded others, an equivalent to the oral traditions of Homer's age and many sub-cultures today is created for the multi-media multi-sensory computer age. Like the cave paintings at Lascaux in France that communicate the Cro-Magnon world to us, such works, as they develop (like the Pythagoras Compositions), can cross language barriers to bring learning-style sensitive knowledge to like minds in any culture. At first, these Compositions might serve only to clarify the understanding of those who make them. But some will speak to others of like mind in their immediate schools, and to classes of children coming after them. As quality develops, Compositions can become resources to individuals of like minds and schools all around the world. The Onadime World Sail program allows Compositions to be distributed for free or sold on the web in many ways. When sold, percentages of revenue from sale can be distributed to the student, the teacher, the school even the school district or the state. Thus, a successful Composition could supply money to fund education from global sales of leading edge technology that reaches across borders and through cultures to inform minds. In this way, a solution to the problem of making learning accessible to diverse mind sets could become a revenue source to education when such revenue is most needed. When Onadime was used in prototype in Chicago, the idea of students making money on their Compositions was at first rejected, but later it was decided this would be good real world economics education. Onadime is currently Macintosh only software. A PC/Wintel version is under development. Teachers of computing who might be interested in this program supplying free Onadime Composers should write to info@onadime.com with a description of their computing resources, and ideas for using Onadime. A qualifying call will be followed by free distribution of 50 Onadime Composers.
Bruce C. Mitchell founded Onadime in 1995 to develop software to transform the computer into an instrument of art. That instrument was to be capable of extending people's natural creativity through the computer's evolving capacities. Artificial intelligence was not the aim, but rather human intelligence stimulated and extended by computerized expression. Onadime's purpose was to make software that could take people to their "frontiers of perception," where the known fades into the unknown in their lives, where learning begins, and creativity informs possibility.
Bruce's career includes college at Harvard, where he graduated with honors, the US Peace Corps and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Mitchell International Enterprises (a diversified transportation company), The World Affairs Council of Seattle, The Frontiers of Perception Institute, service on the Boards of two private companies in Seattle, and Onadime Inc.
Email Bruce at bcmitch@onadime.com
© March 2003 New Horizons for Learning
Office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Special Education
P O Box 47200
Olympia, WA 98504-7200
(360) 725-6088
Fax (360)586-1631
E-mail: dgill@ospi.wednet.edu
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