Little Lectures?
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ttle Lectures? Libby V. Morris
Published online: 9 April 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009
In each issue of Innovative Higher Education we attempt to push the boundaries of teaching and learning by featuring the latest research on innovations in higher education. Accordingly, an article in the March 6, 2009, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education with the intriguing title “These Lectures are Gone in 60 Seconds” caught my attention. The title of the story enticed me to further reading, in particular, the words that followed “lecture”, i.e., “gone” and “seconds”. The combination of these words challenged my conception of this traditional pedagogical approach. In my frame of reference, lectures are “long” and “meaty” and are meant to sustain the attention of an audience while ideas and issues are dealt with in-depth by someone knowledgeable on the topic. Most lectures may be transient in that they are delivered at a set time and place, but they become permanent when they are printed or recorded. My thinking took me further to the nature of historic and contemporary lectures; and I stumbled across the “Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education” (Macmillan Company, 1904), an impressive 600+page book no longer in print but digitized by Google. Actually I did not stumble as I was sitting at my computer surfing the web. Historically, important speeches and lectures were recorded for future generations; and, while contemporary lectures are still sometimes published in print, they are now more frequently recorded for posterity and accessibility as audio or video podcasts. For example, my academic home, The University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, sponsors the Louise McBee lecture each fall. For this event a distinguished guest speaks for 60 minutes about issues important to higher education, and the speech is both videoed and printed for distribution. Interestingly, in recent years fewer speakers have been willing to convert their presentations to printed format since the “lectures” are often delivered as PowerPoint presentations or in a more conversational format. Lectures have a long history in higher education, which dates from the medieval university when professors would read from texts to students who took notes. Today’s lecture proponents point to efficacy with large classes of several hundred students. The close alignment of lecture and large numbers is captured in the term “lecture hall.” L. V. Morris (*) Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, 102 Meigs Hall, Athens, GA 30602-6772, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Innov High Educ (2009) 34:67–68
Numerous books give advice for structuring and delivering lectures, and I assume future publications will include the “1-minute lecture.” Lecture opponents focus on its one-way communication and advocate findings from research and reports by professional associations which stress the use of active pedagogies, such as discussion, writing, field and group work, to make learning more meaningful. Supporters of the lectu
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