The Lecture as a Trans-Medial Pedagogical Form : The Lecture as a Trans-Medial Pedagogical Form Norm Friesen
nfriesen@tru.ca
Overview : Overview Current views on the lecture: “rooted in orality” versus print, electronic & digital media
The Medieval lecture: cultural preservation
The 18th century lecture: authorial performance
The 20th century lecture: dramaturgical effect
The 21st century lecture: the future of an illusion – the lecture as hermeneutic
Diana Laurillard (1993/2001) : Diana Laurillard (1993/2001) Why aren’t lectures scrapped as a teaching method? If we forget the eight hundred years of university tradition that legitimises them, and imagine starting afresh with the problem of how to enable a large percentage of the population to understand difficult and complex ideas, I doubt that lectures will immediately spring to mind as the obvious solution. (93)
What are the assumptions here? : What are the assumptions here? Communication as information transmission
What is the most efficient way?
Verbally: the lecture is “rooted in orality”
Writing, text, printing, electronic, digital
“The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid”
Communication as Information Transmission : Communication as Information Transmission
The medieval Lecture : The medieval Lecture Medieval era: 5th to the 15th century in Europe
No printing press; books areextremely precious; seen as authorities
Lecture (read) from the cathedra (lectern), on which books were designed to fit.
one spoke of going to a lecture to “hear” the a“books” being read
Teaching & Learning as Recovery : Teaching & Learning as Recovery A world of “drifting texts and vanishing manuscripts” (E. Eisenstein)
“the simplest way of getting [books]... was for the teacher to dictate the texts to his pupils” (Hajnal)
Lecture was for copying, to recovery
Lecture was a reading, and reading was a lecture (of sorts; public lectures common)
Slide 8 :
Slide 9 : through the printing press, texts are multiplied, “as now a book is reproduced many thousandfold. Therefore if one, two, three, ten or twenty are burnt or otherwise are given up, there are still very many additional others, so that a book is never totally lost...”
Informational abudance (relative to earlier situation)
The early modern lecture : The early modern lecture The eighteenth [century] appears to be the century when dictation was first stopped, even if only erratically at first” (2006, p. 85).
Mixture of glosses and recitation
“masters noted down on their own copies... a few words by way of résumé, and as a help in their lectures”
25 year lecture as a gloss & commen-tary on book of Isaiah (16th c.) Ulrich Pregizer
The 18th Century Lecture: Johann Gottlieb Fichte : The 18th Century Lecture: Johann Gottlieb Fichte In the 1790’s in the University of Jena, Fichte became one of the first German professors who began officially lecturing without a set text... Fichte and other Romantics began lecturing on their own work without any pretense that that they were glossing a text or recapitulating a tradition... Departure from an actual or even virtual textbook as a basis for lecturing constituted the ultimate break with the sermon [or medieval lecture]. (p. 410)
Fichte as Lecturer : Fichte as Lecturer “extraordinary”
Goethe
“rapturous”
Hegel
Could read as if speaking, and speak as if reading
My principle concern is not what “is printed in books for us to read,” but rather, “what has stirred and transformed our spirit” (Fichte).
I wish to “succeed in scattering in your souls fiery sparks which will arouse and stir them.”
Slide 13 : In Romantic Jena and elsewhere, the cathedra [or podium] became a locus where one created knowledge, became a site of the new, radical stress on spontaneity, creativity and originality. ... a new relation between the Romantic “I” pontificating from the cathedra and the academic chorus [or audience began to emerge].
Theory of knowledge : Theory of knowledge Hermeneutic: meaning originates in the speaking subject
Meaning is created anew, it is not received; it is the inversion of externalizing through speech
It is also created anew in the listening audience: “...scattering in your souls fiery sparks which will arouse and stir them.”
“passionate” and “moving” lecture(r)
20th Century Lectures & their Technology : 20th Century Lectures & their Technology
20th Century Lectures & their Technology : 20th Century Lectures & their Technology Virginia Woolf Theodore Adorno Richard Feynman Stephen Hawking
Lectures in the 20th Century: Dramaturgical Effect : Lectures in the 20th Century: Dramaturgical Effect “In our society we recognize three main modes of animating spoken words: memorization, aloud reading... and fresh talk. In the case of fresh talk, the text is formulated by the animator from moment to moment, or at least from clause to clause. Fresh talk is perhaps the general ideal and (with the assistance of notes) quite common. ...a great number of lectures depend upon a fresh-talk illusion.”
Goffman : Goffman “Your effective speaker is someone who has written his reading text in the spoken register; he has tied him-self in advance to his upcoming audience with a typewriter ribbon”
The most important selves in the lecture is the “self-as-animator” and the “textual self;” the textual self stands behind the self-as-animator” to create the dramaturgical effect / performance
Lecturing in the 21st Century(Lecturing to Large Groups, Morton, 2009) : Lecturing in the 21st Century(Lecturing to Large Groups, Morton, 2009) Structure, preparation and variation
share their passion and enthusiasm for the subject by telling students why they are personally interested in this topic. Where possible, this could be a link to their personal research;
link the lecture to some current news or activity
use relevant and current examples to illustrate the point;
Lecture as Hermeneutic Event : Lecture as Hermeneutic Event not about the textual self, about the dead letters recorded well in advance of the lecture itself. They are instead about the aside and the extemporization, about the illusion of fresh talk or the kind of fluid rendition of a complete or partial text
The lecture, in short, transforms the artefact of the text into an event
An artefact can be reproduced; an event (think of music) is different each time
Slide 21 :
Examples : Examples TED Talks (Technology Entertainment & Design) http://www.ted.com
Teachers’ TV: http://www.teachers.tv/
Academic Earth: http://academicearth.org/ “Online courses from the world's top scholars”
5 min knowledge: http://www.5min.com/
Subject collections: e.g., http://www.egs.edu http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/
Conclusion : Conclusion Lecturing and other key educational activities (e.g. Literacy, test-taking) are about moving between media with fluency and facility
It is not a question of students being “digital natives” and of an older generation of teachers being “digital immigrants”
We are all digital nomads (in different ways), and the better we are able to know terrain within and between media, the better
Happy Travels! : Happy Travels!