""Canned" multimedia would seem to lose much of the capturing-power built
into the cultural forms of the lecture hall lecture. On the other hand they
may have other powers for capturing the attention. (screen hypnosis...) And
they may be shaped for more dialogic forms...""
I'd like to complicate the idea of a lecture for a moment. As part of this
team of people who have been observing in community college classrooms,
we've had the assumption that lectures are about the equivalent of video
tapes of talking heads. In many cases, this is sadly the case. But what
about this? I went to an inner city community college in a particularly
devastated urban area; the study body is mostly African American, the
income level very low, the unemployment rate very high. I visited
a microbiology class. The instructor, a young African PhD, was lecturing
to a class of about 35 students. His voice, accented, was pitched high
and sharp. Its tone cut through the almost continuous oral response of
the students, who were sometimes repeating, sometimes commenting on his
lecture. Students said things like, "Oh, that's itneresting, I didn't
understand that... " or "Now that's different from...." Usually, several
students were talking, almost singing, at once. It was an experience
that involved multiple voices raised at the same time. The lecturer,
meahwnile, filled two blackboards TWICE full of notes (which were the outline
to his lecture) but once they were up on the board, hardly turned his
head to look at them. He stood close to the front of the first row of
desks, gesutring, moving relentlessly through his material. I was
dazzled.
The only other place I've heard of something like this (more music than
what I'm used to calling a speech practice) was in a video of a classroom
in Hawaii, where apparently it is normal custom for one speaker to pick
up before the end of the other speaker's phrase, so that the effect in
a classroom is of waves of overlapping utterance...
If we extend the idea of lecture to include events like this, which are
almost like choral music, what happens to the comparison between lecture and
taped lecture?
Helena Worthen