Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom

Posted by timothy on from the cognitive-dissonance dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching after hearing that other professors can't get his experiments with Twitter and YouTube to work in their classes. Is the lecture best after all?"

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Is the lecture best after all? by owlnation · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.

    Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.

    How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.

    Leave face time for labs and tutorials, forget lectures -- they are a relic of the middle-ages, along with the need to have term and vacation times that match the harvests.

    I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)

    1. Re: Is the lecture best after all? by pz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.

      So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.

      Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session ... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  2. They need to flip their paradigm 180... by hsthompson69 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...have kids watch taped lectures at home, and come to the classroom to do problems and ask questions of the professor in person. Make "homework" "classwork", and make lectures "homework".

  3. More like... by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... rethinking student selection. My god, there are too many people going to school who are not scholastically inclined nor have the work ethic. We instead of created a culture of stupidity and status seeking based on false promises of what can be expected out of an 'education'.

  4. Call Me Old School... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...but I have found lectures to work out better than anything else. I'm a former tech professional now teaching in the humanities, so my lack of interest in social media classrooms has nothing to do with either closed-minded-ness or lack of aptitude with technology. Lectures just tend to work better for me and for every other professor I know. It's not always clear what's going to be grasped quickly, what's going to need more explanation, or even what side issue will grab the attention of the class. Every class is different; only a competent lecturer can adapt to the individual needs of the class. A video can't decide to skip over the point that everyone seems to have grasped more quickly than anticipated but spend more time on the issue that - unexpectedly - proved quite difficult. A video can't engage members of the class directly.

    It's important not to confuse the attributes of a badly delivered lecture (and there are many) with the attributes of lecturing as such.

  5. Re:Wired magazine? by biohazard35 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    For the people who don't want to find what he's talking about, here's the comment from Raspberry Pi about wired:

    Ha – no, that was something else entirely. Wired asked us to give them a copy of our BOM. We told them we couldn’t do that because it’d land us in hot water with our suppliers (particularly Hynix and Broadcom); if their other customers were to use our BOM to demand similar pricing, we’d be in trouble. So instead, they *made up* a BOM (which was gratuitously wrong). They told us they were doing this, and we asked them not to; saying we’d be happier for no article to appear at all. They published it anyway. Our suppliers started getting calls from their other customers, as predicted; we had a lot of apologising to do. Slightly less serious, but still damned annoying: Wired also demanded pictures of a cased version of the final board. This was well before Christmas, at which point we didn’t *have* any beta or final boards, still less any cased ones (the cases are being finished after the board themselves are finished at the end of this month). They didn’t take no for an answer, and kept asking, and asking, and askingand then photoshopped a case onto an alpha board (wrong size, wrong proportions) for their magazine. Which is misleading, but it’s nothing like as damaging as their efforts with the BOM were. Needless to say, they’re off the list for press samples, and they’re not getting any more interviews either (they ran Rob ragged in preparation for this, then never used any of the material they’d got from him). Wired seem to believe they’re still as relevant as they were in 1998. Luckily for us, they’re not; we’ve interacted with hundreds of journalists over the last six months or so, and not a single one of them has been as hard to work with as Wired were.