The New York Sophist

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.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

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?

Here it is. I probably shouldn’t post it, because I make a lot of mistakes, but I was distracted pretty heavily by the technology I was using. Not the best idea to use some new tech when you are trying to teach, but I wanted to give it a try. Also, I had the audience a bit wrong, so I had to adapt on the fly to address the things I thought they might like to know about. In the future I think that the comparisons to policy debate’s attempt to “mind the gap” might be something best left for the end. Or a paper. Yea, probably a paper (this is indeed how my inventional process works – talk about something, become unsatisfied, write down a lot of stuff about it, make it into an essay).

I used a small mixer and a professional microphone to record this on my end, on the other end I am not sure what they had but it looks like it was just a very nice Mac microphone built into the laptop. The sound quality is quite good and it makes me excited to try making some short podcasts about debate!

Things to consider:

1. Delay in reaction – there’s a bit of a delay from the crowd reaction to what I’m saying and it’s hard to attend to it.

2. Moving around things on the computer screen is distracting to my narrative flow – it’s pretty obvious – but I think that will work itself out over time and with some familiarity. More tests are needed.

3. Interactivity. So many simple-minded folks critique this sort of teaching by saying it’s not face to face so you lose something. What is lost? I think the Q&A is possibly the best part. I think unfamiliarity and a lack of experience with the technology is what prompts this criticism.

I fully expect that most Universities will demand 10% of their courses University wide be taught exclusively online over the next 5 years. I hope to get a bit more practice in before this happens.

Last week I shot some asynchronous teaching videos for our University’s “Storm Talk” series – which is where they ask professors to talk about things that interest them for a few minutes here and there and post them to social media sites for student reaction. This might have a bit better application for pedagogy than the “live lecture” – Lecturing might return to its popularly considered form of being ineffective, but this form might be super-effective online, where students can treat the lecture like a “text” – flipping back and forth through it to concentrate on the parts that they consider most difficult or most valuable.

Here it is. I probably shouldn’t post it, because I make a lot of mistakes, but I was distracted pretty heavily by the technology I was using. Not the best idea to use some new tech when you are trying to teach, but I wanted to give it a try. Also, I had the audience a bit wrong, so I had to adapt on the fly to address the things I thought they might like to know about. In the future I think that the comparisons to policy debate’s attempt to “mind the gap” might be something best left for the end. Or a paper. Yea, probably a paper (this is indeed how my inventional process works – talk about something, become unsatisfied, write down a lot of stuff about it, make it into an essay).

I used a small mixer and a professional microphone to record this on my end, on the other end I am not sure what they had but it looks like it was just a very nice Mac microphone built into the laptop. The sound quality is quite good and it makes me excited to try making some short podcasts about debate!

Things to consider:

1. Delay in reaction – there’s a bit of a delay from the crowd reaction to what I’m saying and it’s hard to attend to it.

2. Moving around things on the computer screen is distracting to my narrative flow – it’s pretty obvious – but I think that will work itself out over time and with some familiarity. More tests are needed.

3. Interactivity. So many simple-minded folks critique this sort of teaching by saying it’s not face to face so you lose something. What is lost? I think the Q&A is possibly the best part. I think unfamiliarity and a lack of experience with the technology is what prompts this criticism.

I fully expect that most Universities will demand 10% of their courses University wide be taught exclusively online over the next 5 years. I hope to get a bit more practice in before this happens.

Last week I shot some asynchronous teaching videos for our University’s “Storm Talk” series – which is where they ask professors to talk about things that interest them for a few minutes here and there and post them to social media sites for student reaction. This might have a bit better application for pedagogy than the “live lecture” – Lecturing might return to its popularly considered form of being ineffective, but this form might be super-effective online, where students can treat the lecture like a “text” – flipping back and forth through it to concentrate on the parts that they consider most difficult or most valuable.