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Digital

[LECTURE] Raising Children in a Digital Age … and Business

Looking at ‘Raising Children in a Digital Age‘ as useful information for Foundation Business Students at MMU – helping them look at responsibilities, the culture they’re engaging with – especially if creating content online to create a safer online environment

Raising Children in a Digital Age for Foundation Business Degree @MMUBS from Bex Lewis

Listen to the audio (MP3).

Categories
Academic

Lectures Still of Value?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1380002
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1380002

Really interested in the debates about teaching styles, especially re: lectures:

By the 1970s, educational scholar Donald Bligh had written one of the first comprehensive reviews of the research evidence about teaching in higher education, a book titled What’s the Use of Lectures? It was comprehensively damning. Although there are a number of pedagogic systems that almost every research study has found to be more effective than the conventional alternatives, for the lecture-based approach the reverse is true.

More than 700 studies have confirmed that lectures are less effective than a wide range of methods for achieving almost every educational goal you can think of. Even for the straightforward objective of transmitting factual information, they are no better than a host of alternatives, including private reading. Moreover, lectures inspire students less than other methods, and lead to less study afterwards.

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Categories
Academic

Lecturing on an Ocean Cruise: Sounds Good!

Cruise LinerWell, there’s an idea:

The scholar on stage holds the status of entertainer, putting on a show for a paying audience whose scores will determine whether their lecturer’s short-term contract is renewed.

Fear not: this is not a vision of some dystopian future but rather an unusual, and fascinating, break from the day job – with azure waters and plenty of sunshine thrown in.

For Kathleen Lynch, associate professor in the department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, lecturing on a cruise ship is “the very best kind of outreach experience possible”.

Read full article.

Categories
Digital

Does Style Help Substance?

I thought this was a really interesting piece, as it takes a lot of extra time, etc. to prepare a lecture that’s more interesting, and even more time (often) to not “tell” students, but build in activities where they can learn for themselves:

“The fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness,” say the researchers in the journalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review.

“However…lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned.”

Image Credit: RGB
Image Credit: RGB

There’s a worry that this model is simply being transported online in MOOCs:

“What is really worrying is that people are jumping on the massive open online course bandwagon, taking a failed model and putting it online. We need to rethink how people approach teaching,” he said.

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Categories
Digital

Lectures on their way out? MOOCs in?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1380001

Interesting thoughts on lectures and MOOCs

But we also thought lectures were redundant. Indeed, one star performer, A.J.P. Taylor, who attracted vast audiences to his television lectures, too, told us so, although we all suspected that he did so only to prove himself wrong by telling us all sorts of things we would not find in books and would not hear from tutors. The thought was obvious enough: the Gutenberg Revolution had rendered lectures redundant as a means of imparting knowledge. Before the invention of moveable type and the possibility of producing books on a mass scale, oral transmission of knowledge (or speculation) depended on carefully constructed, often dictated, lectures and on students with ready pens and excellent memories. By 1960, lectures had long been redundant – since shortly after 1440. But lecturers were paid to lecture, so lecture they did.

Of course, all this has to be taken with a grain of salt: much university teaching takes place in small classes, whether in labs or in seminars. An audience of fewer than 30 lends itself to give-and-take discussion – beyond that you need the genius of the likes of Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass professor of government at Harvard University, who somehow contrives to create a dialogue with 1,000 students in a lecture theatre.

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