Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, September 12, 2008

Lecturing at Berkeley...

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this, but ever more of my students are recording my lectures these days. They do this not as a substitute for taking notes but as part of what that process is coming to mean, or so it seems to me. A few have made recordings available to their classmates on the course blog or on their personal blogs or what have you. Definitely it would appear that a proliferating record of these ephemeral performances is going to become part of what it means to be a lecturer.

I'm afraid I'm a dull and dense speaker whenever I try to work from a polished transcript, and so I usually just map a rough outline of topics and page numbers for textual references and key points I don't want to miss, as it were on the back of an envelope, but otherwise I just kinda sorta launch into my topics and see what happens. The level of editing and polishing is jarringly different from that which tends to attend my published work. It's strange. Probably more wholesome than not, all things considered, a nice corrective to any control-freakery I might have.

Anyway, I'll post links to some of my lectures when they seem interesting and I remember to do so. I'd be curious to see how they play outside the charmed circle of the actual community of the classroom, with its shared experience of grappling with the same texts and issues and so on.

This lecture is the second of a two-part introduction to my "What Is Compelling?" course at Berkeley. It's a big lecture hall, and there are over a hundred folks in the room, so there are acoustic weirdnesses here and there. There are also about eight minutes of administrivial preliminaries you might want to skip past at the beginning.

For context, understand that by the time I deliver these lectures, I've already lectured on critical theory over at SFAI for three hours a few hours before, taken the train under the Bay from the City over to Berkeley, had office hours and then sauntered over to this lecture hall. I'm usually feeling a little spacey until excitement about the ideas manages to re-invigorate and re-orient me.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only courses that I ever took where people recorded the lectures were a few information-dense ones like organic chemistry and bacteriology. Usually, my pen didn't leave the paper for the duration of the lecture, so I can understand the value of a recording in that situation. You can miss things.

That was the late 90s. These days, with Blackboard and such, many lecturers provide "lecture notes," which I think gives students an opportunity not to pay attention. They (may think that they) don't even have to show up.

Forcing students to take their own notes is a way of forcing them to be engaged in the material. I learned more and quicker when I took my own notes than when they were provided for me.

Personally, I think undergrads these days are coddled too much. It's all part of a plan to increase college enrollment and retention. Students have to take "University 101" courses and there are "academic alert" systems designed to identify and help students, especially during those critical first two months of college when drop out rates are the highest.

I guess I'm just old school. College isn't for everyone. Future employers will not be as kind to students as colleges are these days. And college ain't high school. In my mind, you choose to go and you pay good money for it. It's your responsibility to get your money's worth.

Dale Carrico said...

Definitely I have refused to go the Powerpoint route. There are no overheads with outlines or what have you in my classes. I always have the impression that lecturers who dumb down their presentations in that way dumb down their audiences as well. If students aren't frantically taking notes every minute I always assume they're surfing their laptops, so I try to keep things engaging.

Seth Mooney said...

Dale, I have no desire to be close enough to your ass to blow smoke up it, but I thought you might want one of your former student’s perspectives on this:

I’ve never recorded lectures (likely because I'm still bumbling my way out of ludditedom), but when I noticed a lot of folk doing so in Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics I solicited copies of the audio files. I never used those files to study, and I still took notes in class. I used those notes to assist my writing, and the lecture recordings never came into the picture.

I was motivated to keep the lectures because they’re so damned entertaining. They’ve gotten little play but I’ve got them around to use whenever I crave a type of thinking that cultivates what I think of as higher political consciousness as well as laughter.

Maybe that’s my angle because I’m 10 years older than the average graduating university student. But I know at least one other person in the class (11 years younger than me) who was motivated in the same way.

I agree that “undergrads these days are coddled too much,” as Martin suggests, but I think that it might be harder for that principle to function in classes that demand exclusively written work. If somebody’s bullshitting their way through and taking shortcuts, their ass is gonna be in a sling when it comes time to expound an idea that incorporates subtleties from two or three other peoples’ complex ideas.

Anne Corwin said...

Dale: just a note on accessibility -- while I am sure some students are indeed lazy, some of us have auditory processing difficulties that can make such things as outlines or slides really useful. I am not saying you need to do these things, or chastisting you for not doing them, but I did want to point out that visual aids are not necessarily "coddling" when some students may be visually-oriented learners.

I enjoy listening to interesting lectures, but if I'm going to be graded on how well I listened, the only thing that has ever allowed me to function is basically transcribing as much of what the lecturer says, word for word (and then later on reading over it and reflecting on it).

I'm not in school right now (graduated in 2002) but whenever I attend lectures out of intellectual interest these days, I take the "transcribe and then blog about it later as I realize stuff" approach. And it is really, really helpful in those cases when people end up podcasting the lectures, because I invariably miss stuff no matter how hard I try to keep up in realtime.

Dale Carrico said...

Good points, Anne. Be assured there is a pretty extensive system providing accommodations and facilitations for many different atypical enablements among the students (and I know that more than a handful of my students in this particular course are making good use of some of them). Of course, it is precisely because some students have bemoaned my rapid speaking and sometimes dense formulations and so on that I have encouraged them to record the lectures and make them available to others in the first place. My mixed feelings about the recordings are more along the lines of the horror I feel upon hearing my voice recorded on an answering machine than worries about the pedagogical impact of the recordings, when all is said and done. I literally cringe at hearing myself in these lectures, especially in moments when I get ahead of myself or momentarily lose track of a point because I don't write out in advance what I am going to say for the hour and half or so each of these lectures goes on. Not to mention, I think my voice sounds simply awful. Still, it is an interesting experiment making them available more generally, seeing how they play outside their original context for different audiences. My curiosity has overcome my reticence here. More links to more lectures surely forthcoming.

Anne Corwin said...

Dale said: My mixed feelings about the recordings are more along the lines of the horror I feel upon hearing my voice recorded on an answering machine than worries about the pedagogical impact of the recordings, when all is said and done. I literally cringe at hearing myself in these lectures, especially in moments when I get ahead of myself or momentarily lose track of a point because I don't write out in advance what I am going to say for the hour and half or so each of these lectures goes on.

Oh I can definitely relate to all of that! I can barely stand to hear tapes of myself or watch any recorded interviews, etc. -- it feels incredibly weird and unsettling. I've gotten more used to it over the past 2 years, though, especially since engaging in my (admittedly short-lived) podcasting experiment, because I had to listen to myself a lot in editing those files. It's sort of a matter of getting to the point where the recorded-you starts sounding like "a version of you", as opposed to some strange alien doppleganger, I guess.

And another thing that bugs me is when I say something that gets recorded (in an interview or otherwise), but then change my mind or gain additional clarity about that thing -- in those cases I REALLY can't stand to listen to my past self, because I keep wanting to say, "No, you nitwit, you're wrong!" :P

Anisa said...

The way you lecture made me positive I wanted to go to grad school because it exemplified everything I love about education. I guess self-criticism never goes away and it can be a useful motivating force, but you should be proud of your lectures; you do a great service in teaching.