Deakin lecturer Paul Nicholson is teaching a course to students at the Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool campuses called ”creating effective learning environments”. There are no physical lectures.
”It’s a mediaeval technology, the lecture, and it’s so inefficient,” he said.
That whole physical thing where you’re a human being and I’m a human being and we’re in the same room at the same time looking at each other and listening to each other, working through ideas by tossing them around, or sitting quietly and pondering someone’s spontaneously expressed thoughts about something…
Yucko.
Embarrassing. Inefficient in a markedly medieval way… It would be so pre-modern for Nicholson to have to take your (shudder) embodiment into account… It would be like trying to get pregnant by having sex …
So, you know, as an efficiency move, more and more Australian – as well as Canadian – university students are skipping lectures, but that’s fine because qua physical entities universities are these insanely creaky medieval devices…
A few defiant antiquarians among students and professors persist. An international law lecturer at Monash keeps threatening to turn off class-obliterating technology: He thinks “it’s bad for us,” reports a student. At the University of Ottawa, students report extremely high levels of dissatisfaction, in large part because of “lack of contact time with professors.”
Nicholson needs to explain to these people how icky and reactionary and … obscene, really … it is to indulge these “contact” fantasies.
You hide behind your computer screen. I hide behind mine.
We do that long enough, and we’ll make the whole physical thing of a university go POOF.
Once that happens, you’ll stop drooling all over yourself about “contact”….
April 11th, 2010 at 10:38PM
I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes I find myself with a horrible thought:
Is this some sort of concerted effort to kill humanity via fake education?
Ok, maybe not kill humanity, but maybe to keep the populace quiet and compliant via ignorance and its valorization.
The former would be a (hopefully unlikely) plot by space aliens, but the latter could be conceivably done by the plutocratic overlords who seem to control every major industry (from the mass media to pharmaceuticals to education).
April 12th, 2010 at 4:46AM
Hey, UD, I love this post!
I guess we have here another prof who thinks his body is just a carrying case for his brain.
I have to suspect that if we put this guy in the classroom, he probably doesn’t have the delivery or facial expressiveness or body language to add any value to his Powerpoints anyway.
April 12th, 2010 at 5:37AM
Tips on Supplementing Your PowerPoint with a Self …
April 12th, 2010 at 7:34AM
I twitch when I hear people refer to profs as “content providers” rather than as “professors.”
This is just that taken to an extreme. I suspect the real conspiracy is that the universities in question believe that by doing stuff online, they can get twice the work out of half the people.
This is something that really concerns me. I’m reasonably good at in-person interaction; I’m not so comfortable with over-the-phone or on-screen interaction: without facial expressions and body language, it can be really hard to interpret what someone is “really meaning.”
And besides, it’s just dehumanizing to reduce education to yet another screen.
April 12th, 2010 at 7:43AM
“Content providers” fits in perfectly with what I was told when I taught at a CC. My job was to provide an “educational product.” Reminds me of the distinction people like Michael Pollan make between food and “food products.” Neither “product” is as good as the real thing, which doesn’t have to be diced, remixed, and refined in order to be palatable, as the students at the U. of Ottawa seem to be pointing out. Good for them.
April 12th, 2010 at 12:59PM
I’m proud to be a medievalist. And kinda medieval about it.
April 12th, 2010 at 3:05PM
I used to sweat so I would get
My lecture whole inside my head.
Now I’m cool, ‘cause I’m no fool
And I use PowerPoint instead.
Make students blink and make them think,
With rhetoric and wit to spare?
Not today, I have to say:
In on-line classes no one’s there.
April 12th, 2010 at 8:17PM
Very cool, adam.