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If applicable, please provide information about your Contracts and Grants Officer if your project is affiliated with an institution that requires your grant to be administered and processed through a Contracts and Grants or Sponsored Projects Office. Provide information about your financial personnel if your project is affiliated with an institution that has a financial office to administer and receive grants. (These are not required fields. This information is not applicable for Young Innovator or individual applications.)

1. What is your conception of participatory learning?

This community would be supported and guided by a rich set of materials rooted in Global African music, theory, and organization. These materials already exist as an online learning environment for e-learning via Dr. Karlton Hester's academic and performance work. Emphasizing an ecumenical approach to learning and performance, his online learning materials have been developed over the last 15 years and are proven in the classroom and online. The Global African nuclear model will serve as a prototype for the creation and inclusion of a wide range of interdisciplinary learning environments, all of which would have the capacity to interconnect and interact with the entire diverse online community.

We encourage all participants to explore the imagination in a variety of fluid ways. We promote the investigation of creativity and innovative visions of possibility. Creativity can be defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, possibilities, or alternatives that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining society. Scientists have evolved theories of human motivation that address questions such as "Why are some people more organized or more creative than others?" or "Why do people dream?" In the final analysis, it seems that biology, learning, and cognition may interact with individual talent and diversity to produce highly productive human behavior. We want to pattern our online experience after constructive behavior, cycles of development, and inherent characteristics of organic growth and development. Ultimately, we hope to find artistic and educational intersections between world music, physics, mathematics, spiritual concepts, and other models that can will express themselves in useful, coherent and convincing creative manners.

Art and science have related interests in understanding all manners of existence. Recently scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider. The experiments to follow are aimed at enabling scientists to look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe. Some have also said that it may be an opportunity to bring somewhat disparate scientific theories together into a single theory of matter. We hope to create an interactive website that enables the entire gamut of emerging and professional artists worldwide (of all ages) to bring disparate creative approaches and theories together into a single experimental production environment where the possibilities of creative collaboration are infinite. With music and vibration as catalysts, such possibilities transcend the physical and cognitive planes and seep into our souls.

2. Have you ever administered or contributed to a digital project? If yes, describe.

Dr. Hester created the Living Encyclopedia of Global African Music (LEGAM) in 2001. The LEGAM is a unique scholarly publication. Karlton Hester is the Founding Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, and Bill Johnson serves as the Executive Director. Current and Past Sponsors include African American Innovators, LLC; University of California, Santa Cruz: Center for Teaching Excellence, Arts Research Institute, Division of Arts, Department of Music, Academic Senate, Porter College, Diversity Funds Grant; and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA)

The LEGAM is an international, trans-disciplinary, peer-reviewed, online encyclopedia dedicated to music and the arts. Its socio-cultural context focuses on topics relating to the music history, music theory, the arts and sciences, religion and spirituality, and trans-disciplinary topics extending beyond limits of traditional categories that traditionally form the boundaries for the term creativity. Its socio-cultural context focuses on the world in which creation unfolds. The Living Encyclopedia of Global African Music also welcomes papers, film, poetry, visual art, and articles from a wide range of perspectives, and disciplines.

http://aainnovators.com

3. Has your work focused on learning, now or in the past? If yes, describe.

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