Lectures were literally invented as a method of text distribution, when printing was unavailable and paper expensive. I don’t mean that in the past they were more effective than integrated instruction—I mean that an academic context in which the main formal service provided was delivery of lectures did not prevent students from thinking about the content of lectures on their own.
Here’s what I meant by the CD metaphor. It seems like there’s an old practice of doing the equivalent of handing students CDs. We can now see that this practice is broken, in the sense that students, lacking CD players, don’t appreciate the music or other audio. One plausible interpretation is that the practice of handing students CDs has always been a poor fit for the audio formats compatible with students’ ears. But another plausible interpretation—the one I’m proposing—is that the students used to have CD players, and no longer do.
Likewise, it’s not as though learning didn’t go on in highly lecture-centric (or book-centric) contexts. So if students aren’t learning from lectures (and books), we might expect that some interpretive faculty they used to have is now absent. This seems to me like it ought to be a higher priority to get to students (or stop taking away from them), than the content of almost any particular lecture course.
Lectures were literally invented as a method of text distribution, when printing was unavailable and paper expensive. I don’t mean that in the past they were more effective than integrated instruction—I mean that an academic context in which the main formal service provided was delivery of lectures did not prevent students from thinking about the content of lectures on their own.
Here’s what I meant by the CD metaphor. It seems like there’s an old practice of doing the equivalent of handing students CDs. We can now see that this practice is broken, in the sense that students, lacking CD players, don’t appreciate the music or other audio. One plausible interpretation is that the practice of handing students CDs has always been a poor fit for the audio formats compatible with students’ ears. But another plausible interpretation—the one I’m proposing—is that the students used to have CD players, and no longer do.
Likewise, it’s not as though learning didn’t go on in highly lecture-centric (or book-centric) contexts. So if students aren’t learning from lectures (and books), we might expect that some interpretive faculty they used to have is now absent. This seems to me like it ought to be a higher priority to get to students (or stop taking away from them), than the content of almost any particular lecture course.