Online Lecturing--Just Don't!

Like most writing teachers, I seldom lecture. Class time is spent in discussion, small groups, individual tutoring--seldom in lecturing. My rule of thumb is that I should never spend more than fifteen minutes waxing poetic in a monologue in front of snoozing students. 

So, I was shocked to find out from a student that a colleague was posting hour and twenty minute video lectures for an online class. When I asked the student how that went, she told me that she kept nodding off trying to watch the first lecture, one of many. She read the writing on the wall (not the syllabus) and dropped the class, realizing that her attention span would only get shorter as you tried listening to two such lectures every week.

This is a telling example of why the best lecture class in the world won't make a good online class. Or, to put it another way, online teaching is about interaction, not information. Or, to put in in even another way, a lecture is just a verbal Wikipedia site.

Perhaps there were times and places when lecturing was a useful way to share knowledge, say, when books were rare and expensive, or when the Irish Hedge Schools sprung up under British rule when Catholic education was forbidden. 

 

Today? Let's face it, lecturing is an outdated technology.
 

Repost of "Gaming Across the Curiculum."

I'm reposting a blog from The Writing Campus on "Gaming Across the Curriculum." The author, Steve Holmes has some interesting insights on gaming and WAC.

http://thewritingcampus.com/2014/09/25/guest-post-gaming-across-the-curriculum/

Twelve Days in Purgatory

I’ve neglected this blog for the last couple of weeks because I took over a summer mini-term course in first year composition for a colleague. I had always been skeptical about mini-term classes, especially for first year composition. How do you squeeze fifteen weeks of work in to twelve days? I was convinced that first year composition required fifteen weeks for the instruction and practice to m make a different in student writing. I used all sorts of analogies to try to describe what takes place in those fifteen week: things needed time to percolate, to ferment, to flower, to rise (as in yeast bread). None of these metaphors got to the vague idea of growth-over-time I was convinced was required. 

After teaching that twelve day class I was surprised at how much the intensity of meeting for three hours and fifteen minutes every day made up for length-of-time. Students wrote some of the best papers I’ve read; and, I got to know those students, as writers and as individuals, in those twelve days. It was a rewarding time, for me as well as for them. 

I’m intrigued with how closely this experience mirrors my experience, and the experience of many of my colleagues, with online learning. We are skeptical, even resistant, until we try it. Then, though we accept the possibilities, we are still not convinced online instruction can match face-to-face instruction. Some of us, myself included, have come to the conclusion that online has the possibilities to be as good as, and in some cases, exceed, face-to-face. In particular, I am intrigued with how much better I get to know my students when I read informal posting from them online than when they sit in my class silently staring at me day after day. 

Grit!

A rainy morning grading papers in Starbucks . When I open the Starbucks log-in page, an article catches my eye: "What a Scuba Diver with a Spinal Cord Injury Has to Teach Us About the Learning Process." Of course, I have to follow the link to Good Magazine, an eMag sponsored by Starbucks.  The title is a tad misleading. The article has great things to say about motivation and character, and how those affect the learning process. In that respect, it's well worth reading. Less micro-detailed than your average academic article on the same subject, which is good. The article does an excellent job of explaining how motivation works in the learning process, and admits the one thing we already know--that we don't really know how to motivate students, not yet.

http://magazine.good.is/articles/scuba-diver-spinal-cord-injury-learning-process-grit

Online vs F2F

In his Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures” (1959), C.P Snow admitted that “Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.” Nothing could be more prophetic, especially when it comes to digital education. A middling few think online can match face to face; and none see it as superior. 

Note M. Edmondson’s Op/Ed in the New York Times, Online Edition: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-education.html?_r=0

In odd moments, I imagine that opponents such as Edmondson are actually engaged in their own version of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” They are dallying in satire that is so subtle, even I, a proponent of online education, don’t notice the hetereglossic play of their words. After all, I think, what could be stranger than someone in the humanities—history, literature, philosophy, or my own discipline, rhetoric—who somehow believes it’s possible to get in touch with someone who lived thousands of years ago through the texts they wrote, not believe they can do the same thing with student writing? How can humanities scholars believe they can enter into Bakhtinian dialogue with those texts (if not the living and breathing person) deny that it’s possible to do the same, and perhaps even more, that is, getting in touch with a living and breathing student through texts they wrote on a blog the night before? 

One would have to buy into the solitary genius theory of literary creation to believe there is any difference.  Let us hope we've left that bit of elitism behind.

So, how about we put this to the test? Take a look at the link below. It will lead you to a blog post written by one of my graduate students. His writing is honest, straightforward, empathetic, in short, full of ethos. Read this and tell me when you get to the end of this brief blog post that you haven’t met this person, haven’t had glimpse into who he is through the text.  

http://fycistheplacetobe.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-leap-of-faith.html

Here’s what blog posts and other texts written by my students tell me: I can meet them without meeting them face to face.

The ability of text to cut through the masks we all carry to make life more livable is why I enjoy reading Plato and Emily Dickenson, two writers who are adept at letting the mask slip. I meet them. Sometimes I enter into dialogue with them. And as ironic as it sounds, that dialogue isn’t always one sided. Plato in particular is rather adept at getting in the last word.