The New York Sophist

Still struggling with this question.

The arguments for podcasting are a lot more persuasive to me: Audio is small, easy to produce at a high quality, easy to transport, upload, download, playable on any device a student could possibly have around them (including ancient computers) and you can do other things while you are listening to them, which is how most students study and work anyway, if you have ever watched them in the student center, or talked to them about how they work through a class.

Video is more attention grabbing, more dynamic. It mirrors the classroom more realistically as there’s a face to look at, there’s a human presentation in the visual as well as the aural, and there’s slides and reference material to look at during the course of the lecture. Most computers can play video, and all phones that the students have, with the rare exception, can play these videos. The videos are not portable, but that’s ok: Everyone has access to a free wi-fi somewhere or a plan where watching a streaming video is not going to kill their ability to use their phone for other activities that month.

Of course many are saying right now: This is not a choice, just make the video and then make the audio available separately. This is not an option to a rhetor. At least not to one who cares about the art! Both are very different approaches to both the audience and the topic. The way I deliver, organize, and prove with just audio will be very different than with video, but both will be of the same quality in the end – hopefully attention grabbing, mesmerizing, and great. Of course, the audience gets to judge that, not me.

The trick with video is I think that the big advantage is being able to put up a slide, an image or some text in the background to support what it is that you are trying to say or get them to understand. With audio you can’t do this at all.

But audio presentations are much more intimate and conversational. You aren’t performing so much your presentation to the class, you are having a one-on-one conversation with the listener about an important idea.

I think what I will have to do is make both. It’s time consuming, but over this holiday I will have nothing but time. The term is nearly over, and the late start gives me a chance to produce both types of lecture for my courses in the spring. I think I’ll just listen to the art and let the audience decide which they like better.

Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would.

The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate?

I explore some of these ideas here. It must be something that I’m working on quite a bit in my unconscious mind as I was able to go for the whole time.

There’s no video – most likely due to privacy concerns for students and such, but I captured the audio.

I’m a big supporter of recording all of your courses, and making sure you record and share whatever happens in the classroom with students who are in that class. There’s really no reason to miss a lecture given the technology we have these days. Students who don’t turn up in person can just listen to the audio file later on.

Also it creates some nice metrics for yourself as a lecturer; you can go back and compare what you talked about last time to this time, etc.

Comments on the lecture are welcome!

My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses.

I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was this going to help anyone understand the readings, or the point of the class? Where was the value? What was the aim or purpose of that instruction?

I decided I needed powerpoints because that’s how online teaching looked to me from other sources. I realized that if I were in the classroom, I probably wouldn’t have made any for this lecture. I would have written terms as needed on the board or typed them into a blank word document on the screen.

I decided instead to adapt what I do to online and just put a blank document behind me to write things on. I think the result was pretty good in terms of a lecture that wasn’t too polished, and had many access points of engagement for students. The only concern I have is that it’s a bit long – I’ve been shooting for under fifteen minutes, but in this case I felt like it was warranted to go a bit longer.

This video is about 30 minutes which is one of my longer ones for teaching, but I chose to do it this way in order to capture the interplay of the various readings for the unit. I think a longer video is ok depending on what you are trying to do. The only time it wouldn’t be ok is if you think that since a normal class is an hour long, your video has to be an hour long. It’s probably better to do videos on concepts that last around 7 to 10 minutes (but much closer to 7).

I could have broken up this talk into 3 talks but the interplay would have been missed, and what the aim here is to get the students thinking about how the readings interact. Perhaps the next unit I’ll break it down more by reading and try to hit that sub 7 minute mark on those.

Yesterday I started making Google Slides presentations for various reading assignments for my courses. I planned to video some lectures with these, but also providing them as documents on the learning management system (we use Canvas in my shop).

As I started making the slides, the amount of work I needed to do kept increasing. For every slide I made, I felt like I needed to make five more because of what making that slide revealed or what it indicated to me needed to be added next to help explain the readings.

I started to get worried. How long was it going to take me to create all of these slides for all of these readings?

What happened was that I lost the thread of the course. My role in the course is not to explain every reading, every argument, every page. My role is to place the reading into the context of the class that I created.

The role of the teacher is not to elucidate the text but to illuminate the text. The function of a good lecture or presentation for students is to provide the light and perspective by which they can read and interpret the text within the context of the course. So I was pretty out of line with what I was trying to do.

The course should be designed as an investigation that requires the students to take what they get from the text and use it to address or add to the questions the course is set out to pose. The course should be structured in a way where the students add their own response and reaction to the reading toward the major aim of the course.

I know all this, and always try to structure my courses around inquiry and keep the spirit of inquiry as the attitude of the course. But yesterday I sort of fell into the social pressure of having to explain the readings, of transmission or transfer of what I think rather than creating the space of exposure and encounter for them to generate their own experience.

Why is teaching so difficult? It always feels like I’m starting over, every semester. It could be that I’m not that great at it, or it could be that it’s just that hard. Or it could be my favorite answer: Good at what? What is there to be good at? Does teaching really exist in terms we can talk about this way?

Giving a talk today via Skype to a policy debate team about Worlds style debating. The question that I am using to orient my comments is one that might be a bit Lacanian: What’s left out? Or, since it’s a format that was created in Britain perhaps the better lecture title might be “Mind the Gap.”

Using this as the principle of constructing how this format works and why it might be valuable to practice seems a better approach than a lot of the head-on, scorched Earth style discussions that many people expect/lament/enjoy/instigate. My feeling is that exposure to one format when one is from another only increases the chances that one might understand the grammar of one’s home format a bit better, becoming a better debater in both formats (over time of course).

What I think happens is the same as in learning a foreign language – you become better able to understand how your own language works when learning a foreign tongue via the weird structural approach that we use in language teaching. This is why many schools report better test results on grammar and reading comprehension when they require Latin in the curriculum.

But it goes a bit deeper. Gadamer in Truth and Method relied on the classics department as his model of a humanities program that doesn’t always go begging to the social sciences for justification on the level of method. The reason why is that these grammars are invented, and one can always interrogate and question the order of the order. Translations in context or out of context or within addendums and modifications to the grammar rules are always in play. This type of fluid understanding is one of the few means to keep truth alive and useful – by keeping it in play, keeping it fluid, keeping it breathing. Dare I say: Keeping it alive.

Debate formats should be like this. Even if you disagree, time is against you. Culture is against you. Show me a policy debate round and I will use the same example to prove that it is not policy debate. Worlds is also changing/changed. These flows and pulses will happen. Do we want to be swept up by the waves or do we want to ride them? Better still, let’s learn how to surf. Enjoy your symptom, as Zizek would say.

Mind the gap when exiting or entering the format.