The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing
Later this year, I will be doing some lecturing, and in thinking about what and how I will be presenting, the question occurred to me: what can I do in a lecture better than, for example, handing out an article for the students to read? I can think of two things immediately:
It’s unlikely that I am a good speaker (having never lectured before; my only real exposure to talking in front of groups is tutoring, which is rather different (though sadly not different enough)). It’s also unlikely that I’ll get much feedback (unless I get a stereotypical mature student in the audience). What other reasons are there for giving lectures rather than using some other form of communication? And what can I do to play up the benefits of the advantages I’ve listed?
Posted by jamie on March 14, 2005 15:09+13:00
Ho ho. :)
I’m certainly looking to have some mediæval images as part of the talk, since I will be talking a litle bit about the mediæval literature side of things. I may well include a family tree, too, to show how Aragorn is related to just about every man and elf mentioned in the Silmarillion. But such things can be put into a handout, and isn’t therefore distinctive of the lecture breed.
Posted by: Jamie on March 14, 2005 16:39+13:00
Lectures are good for breadth and for depth, but not at the same time.
Go broad. Use lectures to connect the far dots of what you're talking about. A lecturer, unlike an article, can keep its audience up to speed when making allusions and direct references, because it knows its audience and what information they've already come into contact with. An article has to constantly build up from nothing, or leave its connections implicit.
Go deep. A lecture is good for taking one aspect of something and exploring it down to the bottom (or a bottomish place at least). Pick something, start digging down, and don't stop. Don't worry about placing it in context - just keep diving further downwards. It's the kind of activity that takes confidence in comprehension, and as students by definition don't have that, you can provide it.
Posted by: morgue on March 15, 2005 11:08+13:00
A lecture should provide an alternative view of the material that the students are getting anyway, via handouts etc. There’s no point in repeating what they already have.
Posted by: Michael on March 15, 2005 12:22+13:00
Posted by: stephen on March 15, 2005 16:50+13:00
Video isn't the only medium that isn't available in a handout. I dunno if you think the old audio recordings of the books are up to par, but there's other options too: giving your audience a taste of the old boy's voice could help to personalise the text in ways that breed beyond what your expectations, even if it's not his voice reading the texts. Writing can still appeal to the auditory imagination.
There's a recording in the public library (in a 3-disc set of famous writers including Tolstoi and Shaw as well. If I could remember the title I'd give it, but those details may be a start), where he and some other bloke talk about their radios.
Posted by: Andrew on March 26, 2005 18:08+12:00
Thanks everyone for the comments. Morgue, the lecture will definitely be deep rather than broad, and I take your point about not trying to do both. Indeed, I've already been advised to leave out most of the mediæval material, due to the potential to just confuse the students by distracting from the threads in the Tolkien (which is certainly the main focus).
Michael, the students won’t be getting this stuff any other way, unless I create some handouts for the class (and I have no idea what such would be).
Thanks for the link Stephen; I fall, for once, between the two extremes. I personally don’t find lectures a particularly good way of learning anything, but they can be really good for giving me a few starters and inspiring interest by exposing me to stuff I wouldn’t otherwise come across. It’s great to get the juxtapositions that are, in some senses, unique to the lecturer.
Andrew, thanks for the information — I found the work you mean in the catalogue, and will certainly check it out. It would be great for people to be able to hear the professor mumbling away! (I have some snippets of him on DVD, and it can be hard to follow; apparently he was like that in lectures too.)
Posted by: Jamie on March 26, 2005 18:25+12:00
Just a follow-up about the recording of Tolkien: it’s a very short piece of him talking with A. Lloyd James as part of a set of records for use by foreigners learning English. Not perhaps the best thing I can play; I may try and find other recordings (though a quick search shows that publishers of Tolkien recordings apparently haven’t heard of compact discs).
Posted by: Jamie on April 19, 2005 09:49+12:00
Posted by: Alastair on April 26, 2005 21:49+12:00
Posted by: sue on March 14, 2005 16:18+13:00