An interesting (and challenging) article from Taylor Halverson:
This challenge will be difficult for many academics to take up. After all, not a few of us went into teaching largely because we treasure our own opinions and love the sound of our own voices. We have brilliant ideas and insights that even the least interested desperately need to hear, and sometimes at great length. (My favorite definition of the word professor? “Someone who talks in other people’s sleep.”)
The word lecture derives from the Latin term for “reading.” Originally, before printing, lecturers would often read from a manuscript — their own, or perhaps a work of Plato or Aristotle or some other luminary — very slowly, so that students could copy it for themselves, and would offer commentary and elucidation along the way. To a large extent, that mode of “lecturing” became obsolete with Gutenberg and the advent of reasonably-priced textbooks. And now, with personal computers and the internet and so forth, we really ought to be thoroughly rethinking how we do education. Simply transferring information orally (and often in garbled form) from a professor’s notes to the notes of a group of students is no longer quite enough.
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