"The Traditional Lecture Is Dead. I Would Know—..." Topic

…I'm a Professor.

"When I was young, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web or video streaming. If you wanted to watch something, you had to wait until it appeared on television. Sometimes you might think, "Hey, I think I'll watch a show," and flip the channels until you found something interesting. This is how I discovered The Mechanical Universe … And Beyond.

If you are not familiar with this wonderful television program from the mid-'80s, it was essentially a college-level introductory physics class presented by Cal Tech University. It included classroom lectures by Cal Tech applied physicist David Goodstein, some excellent physics demonstrations, and cool stuff like historical reenactments. The thing I remember most about it is how it mathematically manipulated equations with weird animation. Now that I think about it, those animations probably reinforced the incorrect notion of "moving stuff to the other side of the equation," but still. They were cool.

Now that the internet exists, you can find The Mechanical Universe on YouTube, and you ought to check it out. Beyond being awesome, it shows why the traditional college lecture is dead.

What is the traditional lecture? It is a model of learning in which a teacher possesses the knowledge on a given topic and disseminates it to students. This model dates to the beginning of education, when it was the only way of sharing information. In fact, you occasionally still see the person presenting the lecture called a reader, because way back before the internet and even the printing press, a teacher would literally read from a book so students could copy it all down…"
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Amicalement
Armand

seems like a video of someone talking at me about something is still a lecture. Now instead of a roomful of relatively wealthy people, a million people anywhere in the world can see it without having to move. I call that pretty serious progress.

Except that what they look up are mostly music videos and video game replays, not educational programs. Vive la technology!

Tough to ask a question of a video, but…when paired with a Cortana/Alexa voice gizmo (or just plain Google). Anyone ever try to question C/A about wargaming? :)

For example, assuming I'm watching some educational wargame video (is that an oxymoron?) about the History of Gaming, so I want to ask: "What was the first wargame to use dice?"

Using Google, I can't find a specific answer, but I do find this in further links in Wikipedia under Charles S. Roberts.

"Charles S. Roberts created the first board wargame for the mass market, Tactics,[5] in an apartment in Catonsville, Maryland in 1952."

I have a book in my library about the History of Wargames, so I'd have to look it up myself to find the "first" wargame that used dice…

So, now I'm being shown a clip on playing Dungeons and Dragons. So I ask: Why did Dungeons and Dragons use a d20?

Amazingly, I find an answer:

"David Wesely is credited by Dave Arneson with having introduced polyhedral dice to D&D."

And it goes on to reference an article by Dave Arneson:

"My European tour finally pulled into London, England and I visited a game store near Trafalgar Square called The Tradition Stop (Note: All times, places and locations are subject to poor recollection. I am doing my aged, feeble best.)

Upstairs was a small game section -- the games at the time being purely ones with military miniatures. (Board games in England were a rarity back then.) Amidst the Military History books, painting guides, and miniatures was a small bin containing a handful of 20-sided dice.

They were red and black. The numbers were not 'filled' and judging but the flaws in the ones I still have, not all that well made.

I bought three pairs.

…

After Don't Give Up the Ship I started in on Blackmoor (the forerunner of D&D), and the 20-siders resurfaced. Magic, being the strange, arcane thing that it is, cried out for strange dice.

…

OK, so D&D was going to be published. We needed a source of 20-siders. The boys in Geneva found a source on the West Coast.

It was a small educational toy company that sold sets of dice for showing shapes. Each set had 1-4 sided (yellow), 1-6 sided (pink), 1-8 sided (bright green), 1-12 sided (light blue), and one 20-sided (a white one numbered 1-10).

Made of soft plastic no one realized how quickly the 20-siders would wear out.

…

The rules were not quite done when a problem arose. Would we break open the sets and take out only the 6-sider and the 20-sider? (The others would be donated to a local school)

Well, a little work shoed how labor intensive that would be, not to mention a waste of dice.

The answer?

Add rules that used the 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 12-sided, and not just the 20-sided dice."

I suppose a video can work OK for basic concepts of just about anything, but for nitty gritty, you need some sort of Q&A mechanism…not to mention lab work.

Traditional lectures were a total waste of time even when I went to uni in the 70's. But giving them paid the wages of a lot of people on a free ride through life.

With the ease and rapid availability of information on the net. IMO, generally most have little excuse for being "poor" students. It's a matter of motivation, etc., …

Regardless, even online, I still suck at Algebra …

Some still do $400,000 USD doing them..;)

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I liked the scene from Real Genius where the professor had a tape player delivering the lecture, and the students had left tape recorders on their desks to record it… ;-)

Lectures are the least effective method of learning I think.

It is passive, is rarely tailored well to it's audience and does not involve the audience to think, engage or debate.

I've been to a number of great lectures where I learned a lot, don't confuse someone's apathy for the medium.

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