I teach Research Methods in Psychology. The class is structured to be a lot of work for the undergraduates at NU. It is often viewed with dread by the students. There's a lot of writing and the material seems like it might be pretty dry.
So I was jealous when I see Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman occasionally post their class syllabi online to their blogs. Their classes look interesting, but I wouldn't post a Research Methods syllabus online. Who'd want to read that on purpose?
Reflecting on this, I think maybe I'm doing it wrong. People actually like science. There are science columns in all sorts of weeklies, in newspapers, on the "most emailed" list at Yahoo or other news aggregators. And a lot of that science is not so good. People should be better at distinguishing the good stuff from the weak stuff and in theory, Research Methods is the class where they would learn to do this.
I haven't figured out how to do it right yet, though. I'm not posting the syllabus. Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel seems to manage to teach some science and get people to watch on purpose. I can't think of a way to blow stuff up in Research Methods, though.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Newspapers and colleges
Title copied from DeLong:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/newspapers-and-colleges.html
Who linked the key idea from Kevin Carey:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i30/30a02101.htm
Question: Are colleges in trouble the way newspapers are in trouble? Will digital access to content wreck their business model?
My answer: No.
First, if you are teaching such that the YouTube or iTunes videos of your lectures are equivalent to taking the class, something seems to be going wrong. This is especially true if you have a reasonably small class size. Students know how to read. If the written material is sufficiently unclear that you need to then come to class and explain it, maybe you need a better text. The lecturer should be adding value over a good text one way or another.
In big classes where interaction is limited, the lecturer can add value by shaping the information from the text (emphasis/paraphrasing). Because of writing/printing lags, we can assume the text isn't necessarily up to date in every way. Maybe places where the lecturer challenges a claim of the text signals areas of interesting debate. But what about fields where the basic information doesn't change much year to year (e.g. calculus, but not psychology)? And what happens when students get their textbooks from a Kindle that can update more rapidly?
There's a learning and memory question in there: is it better to read, hear or read+hear for long-term memory of the content. The last of these implies multiple repetitions which is better. But is podcast+text < lecture+text? If not, maybe intro classes do end up changing a lot with technology.
Second, there are definitely classes and probably also extracurricular activities that depend entirely on discussion and face-to-face interactions. These become more available and potentially more important as the big intro classes become easier. One good example from the Psych department at NU is that a lot of our Psych majors get to participate directly in psychological research via an independent study. Neither Psychology nor scientific methods are as generally well understood as they could be and hands-on work in a lab is not only fun, but very valuable in both of those domains.
Third, there is a lot more to being at a college than just sitting in lectures. I'm not entirely convinced that the social networking being done outside the classroom isn't occasionally as valuable (or more) than the facts being absorbed from the courses taken. I think some professors/lectures forget this on occasion. We're a small piece of undergraduate education even beyond the fact that each of our classes is just one in the midst of many that students take.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/newspapers-and-colleges.html
Who linked the key idea from Kevin Carey:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i30/30a02101.htm
Question: Are colleges in trouble the way newspapers are in trouble? Will digital access to content wreck their business model?
My answer: No.
First, if you are teaching such that the YouTube or iTunes videos of your lectures are equivalent to taking the class, something seems to be going wrong. This is especially true if you have a reasonably small class size. Students know how to read. If the written material is sufficiently unclear that you need to then come to class and explain it, maybe you need a better text. The lecturer should be adding value over a good text one way or another.
In big classes where interaction is limited, the lecturer can add value by shaping the information from the text (emphasis/paraphrasing). Because of writing/printing lags, we can assume the text isn't necessarily up to date in every way. Maybe places where the lecturer challenges a claim of the text signals areas of interesting debate. But what about fields where the basic information doesn't change much year to year (e.g. calculus, but not psychology)? And what happens when students get their textbooks from a Kindle that can update more rapidly?
There's a learning and memory question in there: is it better to read, hear or read+hear for long-term memory of the content. The last of these implies multiple repetitions which is better. But is podcast+text < lecture+text? If not, maybe intro classes do end up changing a lot with technology.
Second, there are definitely classes and probably also extracurricular activities that depend entirely on discussion and face-to-face interactions. These become more available and potentially more important as the big intro classes become easier. One good example from the Psych department at NU is that a lot of our Psych majors get to participate directly in psychological research via an independent study. Neither Psychology nor scientific methods are as generally well understood as they could be and hands-on work in a lab is not only fun, but very valuable in both of those domains.
Third, there is a lot more to being at a college than just sitting in lectures. I'm not entirely convinced that the social networking being done outside the classroom isn't occasionally as valuable (or more) than the facts being absorbed from the courses taken. I think some professors/lectures forget this on occasion. We're a small piece of undergraduate education even beyond the fact that each of our classes is just one in the midst of many that students take.
Teaching and technology
Comments on other people's blogs feel like they disappear too quickly. I can keep better track of my thoughts and maybe even share them here. FWIW, the name comes from something else altogether but I like the phrase.
The motivation to set this up is to describe some ideas I've recently had about teaching. The idea and new things I'm trying in teaching were really all inspired by Brad DeLong's blog. Although our fields are different (economics for him, cognitive neuroscience and psychology for me), we share a certain technophilia and interest in how technological change influences information transmission and the consequences of those changes.
The current teaching experiment is using podcasts as part of my teaching of Research Methods in Psychology. When I first mentioned my idea to the academic technology staff here at Northwestern University, they assumed I wanted to record my lectures. No, that's not the idea. My idea is that as video is easy and cheap, why are we lecturing to students? In my own teaching, I spend part of the time talking at the students (lecturing) and part in more interactive discussions and exercises. The latter part of that seems to be where face-to-face interaction is actually useful.
So the idea is to pre-record a podcast of the 10-15m I used to spend at the beginning of the class lecturing based on the text. The lecture was to emphasize parts, de-emphasize other parts, paraphrase and review content they were supposed to have already read. This was followed by analysis and discussion of good and bad research examples. If they pre-watch the lecture part, I can spend the whole class on the interactive parts. In theory, this may enhance education, but in practice - ?
The seed for the core idea comes from DeLong's economic history note on Universities:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/08/why-are-we-here.html
Excerpted:
Once the printing press arrives, book prices drop and yet, universities and lecturing persists.
In theory, classroom lecturing persists because the professor is adding something not immediately available just from the written text. Some of that comes from the ability for students and professors to interact in the classroom. Some of it may come from the immediacy of having somebody standing in front of you telling you the information -- maybe that's better for learning and memory than reading in some cases? Maybe the lecturer can re-phrase, re-act to the audience and provide better emphasis?
The podcast+more interaction theory is based on the idea that hearing it is a good supplement to reading it and interaction is useful and worth spending as much time as possible on.
The motivation to set this up is to describe some ideas I've recently had about teaching. The idea and new things I'm trying in teaching were really all inspired by Brad DeLong's blog. Although our fields are different (economics for him, cognitive neuroscience and psychology for me), we share a certain technophilia and interest in how technological change influences information transmission and the consequences of those changes.
The current teaching experiment is using podcasts as part of my teaching of Research Methods in Psychology. When I first mentioned my idea to the academic technology staff here at Northwestern University, they assumed I wanted to record my lectures. No, that's not the idea. My idea is that as video is easy and cheap, why are we lecturing to students? In my own teaching, I spend part of the time talking at the students (lecturing) and part in more interactive discussions and exercises. The latter part of that seems to be where face-to-face interaction is actually useful.
So the idea is to pre-record a podcast of the 10-15m I used to spend at the beginning of the class lecturing based on the text. The lecture was to emphasize parts, de-emphasize other parts, paraphrase and review content they were supposed to have already read. This was followed by analysis and discussion of good and bad research examples. If they pre-watch the lecture part, I can spend the whole class on the interactive parts. In theory, this may enhance education, but in practice - ?
The seed for the core idea comes from DeLong's economic history note on Universities:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/08/why-are-we-here.html
Excerpted:
The Pre-Gutenberg University:
- Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
- A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
- Hence if you have a "normal" college--eight semesters, four courses a semester--and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can't be done.
- Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them--hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader--while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever...
Once the printing press arrives, book prices drop and yet, universities and lecturing persists.
In theory, classroom lecturing persists because the professor is adding something not immediately available just from the written text. Some of that comes from the ability for students and professors to interact in the classroom. Some of it may come from the immediacy of having somebody standing in front of you telling you the information -- maybe that's better for learning and memory than reading in some cases? Maybe the lecturer can re-phrase, re-act to the audience and provide better emphasis?
The podcast+more interaction theory is based on the idea that hearing it is a good supplement to reading it and interaction is useful and worth spending as much time as possible on.
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