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:

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.