Item: notes from last weekend's writing panels
I wrote a few weeks ago about the presence of screens everywhere. I suppose this will not seem strange to those growing up now. When I was sitting in various classrooms at UCLA this weekend, I was thinking that the college classroom experience is probably now completely different than it was when I was going through it. I don't know why, but it abruptly occurred to me that professors probably use Power Point or some similar thing. Everyone else does; why wouldn't they?
In the 2 education classes I've taken in my career, I remember a lot of talk about the traditional lecture format versus group interaction, what is called collaborative learning. The widespread belief was that students learn better in ways that require direct participation, by breaking up into small groups and learning from each other, rather than by an instructor standing up front and doing all the talking. Or, now that I think about it, maybe the belief wasn't that students learned better in these ways, but definitely there was a belief that students would be more comfortable learning in these ways. I think such group scenarios are valuable as training for the workplace, but academically speaking, I have my doubts.
Lecture is kind of a bad word, I guess, since we use the same word to mean being reprimanded by someone, but that's not the kind I'm talking about. A good lecture can engage a person in a way that ordinary insights from her peers never can. If the person who is speaking both a) has something to say and b) is good at saying it, a good lecture is both demanding and enjoyable. I know I've learned tons from good lecturers. Of course, they aren't all good, which is maybe why this format started to be resisted.
I try to think of other settings that began as 1 person standing in front and everyone else listening, like preaching or a political meeting. But these speakers, too, are now almost always supplemented by something else, usually something on a screen. The assumption is that you can't just stand there and talk, and expect the audience to pay attention.
There used to be people who could command a room on their own, but this is not a skill much in demand anymore. There still are a few who can do this, but not a lot. Why put all that pressure on yourself when you can just show video clips? I don't think these 2 things are unrelated, the rise of multimedia and the demise of really good public speaking. Which came first, I wonder, the appearance of screens or the disappearance of people with real-life presence.
I am sorry that this society seems to be losing this experience, of a live person connecting with other live people, of wanting to listen to a person speak for hours and being sorry when he stops. Public speaking is an art form: part theater, part rhetorical strategy, part logic, and I think, part belief in the truth of what one is saying. When I say that, what also comes to my mind are people who used that gift badly: demagogues, fakes, manipulators. Maybe the public has lost its trust in people who speak well. Oddly enough, though, we still choose to trust the screen.
In the 2 education classes I've taken in my career, I remember a lot of talk about the traditional lecture format versus group interaction, what is called collaborative learning. The widespread belief was that students learn better in ways that require direct participation, by breaking up into small groups and learning from each other, rather than by an instructor standing up front and doing all the talking. Or, now that I think about it, maybe the belief wasn't that students learned better in these ways, but definitely there was a belief that students would be more comfortable learning in these ways. I think such group scenarios are valuable as training for the workplace, but academically speaking, I have my doubts.
Lecture is kind of a bad word, I guess, since we use the same word to mean being reprimanded by someone, but that's not the kind I'm talking about. A good lecture can engage a person in a way that ordinary insights from her peers never can. If the person who is speaking both a) has something to say and b) is good at saying it, a good lecture is both demanding and enjoyable. I know I've learned tons from good lecturers. Of course, they aren't all good, which is maybe why this format started to be resisted.
I try to think of other settings that began as 1 person standing in front and everyone else listening, like preaching or a political meeting. But these speakers, too, are now almost always supplemented by something else, usually something on a screen. The assumption is that you can't just stand there and talk, and expect the audience to pay attention.
There used to be people who could command a room on their own, but this is not a skill much in demand anymore. There still are a few who can do this, but not a lot. Why put all that pressure on yourself when you can just show video clips? I don't think these 2 things are unrelated, the rise of multimedia and the demise of really good public speaking. Which came first, I wonder, the appearance of screens or the disappearance of people with real-life presence.
I am sorry that this society seems to be losing this experience, of a live person connecting with other live people, of wanting to listen to a person speak for hours and being sorry when he stops. Public speaking is an art form: part theater, part rhetorical strategy, part logic, and I think, part belief in the truth of what one is saying. When I say that, what also comes to my mind are people who used that gift badly: demagogues, fakes, manipulators. Maybe the public has lost its trust in people who speak well. Oddly enough, though, we still choose to trust the screen.
posted by Karen at 7:39 PM
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