Lectures in sciences, where they are most common, are in effect
multimedia animated textbooks. They belong on CD-ROMs, with the
appropriate tools for annotating them, adding notes, etc. Few of
them are truly interactive, and an interactive session with the
instructor _following_ study of the multimedia "textbook" would be
much more valuable. This process exists in places where there are
"discussion sessions" following lectures, though they are often
perverted into "problem-solving" sessions by the pressure of the
testing procedures used.
You can't evaluate a learning process outside the context of
students' concerns about testing and its consequences.
Yes, note-taking gets in the way of thinking during a lecture
(and overheads present data at a higher rate than board-writing)
when too many notes have to be taken per unit time (really per
unit content episode). There is a lot of silent dialogueing
in lecture halls, and I suspect that less note-taking would
prompt some of this to actually become publicly verbalized.
Certainly more note-taking suppresses student cross-talk, as
every secondary school teacher knows. It also suppresses public
questions.
Few lectures amount to more than a "second textbook" and students
would be better off (as I myself often did) to get a second and
third textbook from the library and inter-read these with the
primary textbook. But many instructors base their testing on their
lecture notes rather than the textbook.
In fields such as science, except at the most advanced levels,
content is so standardized that the lectures serve only the
function of signalling what the instructor is more likely to
include on the test. This could be done much more efficiently.
Most lectures, in my experience, are ego-trips for lecturers
who believe their presentations are clearer than those of the
textbook they themselves selected. Textbooks, however, ought to
be better, given the time and field testing that should go into
them. Great lectures become textbooks (e.g. the Feynman lectures
in physics). Until recently, the multimedia capability of lectures
added to their value, but that is no longer necessarily true.
Lecturers time is valuable, and most of it is wasted in the
preparation and delivery of lectures.
It would be far more efficient to present great lectures in forms
that continue to be available to students at all times (as in
digital recorded form), and are annotatable, and use lecturers'
expert time for discussion, commentary, insight, critique, reference
to unusual sources and viewpoints, etc. (Much of that could also
be done on-line.)
In fields unlike science where content is not standardized, the
lecture represents a textbook with too small a market for commercial
publication (i.e. one lecturer's viewpoint), but the economics of
that are now also changed by electronic media. Many such lectures
probably would not want to be rendered durable, however.
Finally, a key issue regarding lectures is the extent to which
they are in effect interactive on the _lecturer's_ part as well
as the students'. That is, does the lecturer customize the lecture
to a particular group, to its ongoing reactions during the lecture,
to any public responses during it (not the same thing), etc.? This
gives the lecture special value above even the electronic textbook
of today, though not perhaps above the self-customizing ones of
the near future.
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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