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The purpose of this study was to compare the creative musical identities of pre-service music education students in the United States and England. A 20-item survey was created based on previous work in the area of music teacher identity (Isbell, 2008). Survey items related to music making activities typically associated with creativity in music education, including composition, improvisation, popular music, and ‘new music’ ensemble participation, were completed by students (n = 159) from nine different universities in the United States and nine universities in England. Findings suggest that pre-service music education students in the US feel less confident about their abilities to compose music, less comfortable teaching composition, and are less likely to plan on ‘teaching students to compose/improvise their own original music when [they] get a job as a music teacher’ than their English colleagues. Differences in primary and secondary socialization are proposed to account for the differences in survey responses between the two populations. The authors propose that music educators in the US might benefit from consideration of incorporating some practices from the system in England.

COVEN (Collaborative Virtual Environments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI, and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results, our driving applications, the main components of our technical investigations, and our experimental activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Technical results are being integrated in an enriched networked VR platform based on the dVS and DIVE systems. Taking advantage of a dedicated Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component of the project is a trial and experimentation activity that should allow a comprehensive understanding of the network requirements of these systems as well as their usability issues and human factors aspects.

A central aim of the COVEN project was to prototype large-scale applications of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that went beyond the existing state of the art. These applications were used in a series of real-scale networked trials that allowed us to gather many interesting human and technological results. To fulfill the technological and experimental goals of the project, we have modified an existing CVE platform: the DIVE (distributed interactive virtual environment) toolkit. In this paper, we present the different services and extensions that have been implemented within the platform during the four years of the project. Such a presentation will exemplify the different features that will have to be offered by nextgeneration CVE platforms. Implementation of the COVEN services has had implications at all levels of the platform: from a new networking layer through to mechanisms for high-level semantic modeling of applications.

Musicians are acknowledged to lead complex working lives, often characterised as portfolio careers. The higher music education research literature has tended to focus on preparing students for rich working lives and multiple identity realisations across potential roles. Extant literature does not address the area of work-life balance, which this paper begins to explore, as the authors seek to better understand potential challenges around combining music graduates' multivariate ambitions, commitments and identities as musicians in the world. Rich data are presented, following interviews with professional musicians in London, UK, discussing health, portfolio careers and family. The authors conclude that more research is required to gain a deeper understanding of work-life balance for musicians, and that pedagogical approaches in higher music education could more effectively help students to prepare for their futures in a more holistic way.

We consider the role of collaborative learning during information searching. We report on observations of situated collaboration in a physical library, which informed the development of our system, Ariadne. This was intended both to investigate and support the learning of search skills. An iterative development and testing methodology was applied. The system has a mechanism for recording an interaction history of the search process. A visualisation of this process makes it easier for users to reflect, share and comment upon their understanding with others.

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The utilization of context (such as user location and user profile) opens up many new avenues for encouraging social interaction. The web-based GUIDE system enables visitors to the city of Lancaster to interact with an information model that represents the city via a hand-held and context-aware tourist guide. Our current work is focusing on extending the functionality of the (previously single user) GUIDE system by making parts of the information model public. In particular, the physical location of visitors can now be represented in the information space in order to enable a form of social awareness among city visitors. In addition, visitors can also change the information space by, for example, augmenting existing descriptions of the city's attractions with their own ratings. We believe that explicitly capturing and tagging the context associated with ratings provides a powerful mechanism for automatically tailoring information presented to the user. Keywords Mobilecomputing, context-awareness, adaptive hypermedia, social awareness, social navigation. everyday objects such as coffee cups [9] and mobile phones [14].One of the most significant pieces of work to have investigated the sharing of location context took place at the Olivetti Research Laboratory through their work on the Active Badge system [ 16]. A variety of location-aware applications were developed utilizing this technology. One example was an application that allows a badge to behave as a simple audible pager that notifies the wearer when new e-mail arrives, but only when the system senses that the wearer is away from his or her office. However, all the testing and evaluation that took place was centered around the work environment, and so it was perhaps not too surprising that many users felt skeptical about having their location activity recorded and made available to others.For our work, the privacy implications are slightly different. Our users are tourists visiting the city, and are acting at their leisure. Furthermore, users may remain anonymous to the system if they wish. It will be interesting to investigate how these factors affect the privacy issues raised by previous work on the sharing of location information [ 10] [ 16].