The Face-to-Face Lecture, Only Accidentally Valuable? Lessons from Cognitive Surplus
Here’s the next installment in my series (parts one, two, and three) on Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
In Chapter 2, Shirky described the means by which people are now able to pool their cognitive surplus for the greater good. In Chapter 3, Shirky described various motivations people have for engaging in such collaborative action. In Chapter 4, Shirky moves on to discuss the opportunities that people have to do so, although Shirky doesn’t add much new to his argument in this chapter. In brief, Shirky argues that changes in opportunities allow people to act in new ways on motivations they’ve always had.
For example, Shirky points out that those in Generation X (people born between 1965 and 1982) had a reputation for being slackers in the late 1980s and early1990s. They seemed to turn into entrepreneurs in the mid 1990s, however. Did their motivations change? No, Shirky says, it was the economic climate that changed. “In a recession [such as the one that followed the 1987 market crash], taking a dead-end job and conserving costs by hanging out with friends and drinking cheap beer are perfectly sensible responses.” When the economy picked up, Gen Xers put away their Playstations and Nirvana albums and got to work, just they would have done earlier if they had been able to.
Stated slightly differently, Shirky’s argument is this: We shouldn’t make assumptions about people’s motivations based entirely on their past behavior, that we need to factor in the contexts in which that behavior was enacted. As Shirky notes, we used to memorize all our friends’ phone numbers, but that’s not because we wanted to spend those brain cells in that way. We just didn’t have cell phones with on-board memory to relieve us of that burden. Shirky provides a few other examples, and then writes:
“We did those things for decades or even centuries, but they were only as stable as the accidents that caused them. And when the accidents went away, so did the behaviors.”
This raises the same question I raised in my first post on Cognitive Surplus: Are there activities in which higher education faculty engage that seem inherently valuable that are only accidentally valuable?
Robert Talbert commented that the face-to-face lecture might just be such an activity, and it would seem that Bill Gates, New York University, and Anya Kamenetz (author of DIY U) are thinking the same thing. Might recorded lectures available online make the traditional college lecture a thing of the past, an activity that was only valuable when great lectures were hard to come by? Perhaps, but it’s not that recorded lectures haven’t been available before the last couple of years. Have you flipped through a SkyMall catalog in the last decade or so? Vendors like the Teaching Company have been making college lectures available (albeit on VHS and DVD) for years now. And educational documentaries have been a staple on PBS for a long time.
What kinds of opportunities to view recorded lectures have changed in the last few years that might produce a significant shift away from the traditional face-to-face lecture? I see two big ones–the long tail of online videos and the on-demand nature of online videos. If you want to learn about a science topic, you no longer have to be at the mercy of NOVA‘s programming schedule (what and when). You can probably find something useful online. (Start by seeing if there’s something on the topic at the Khan Academy.) Will the on-demand long tail of online videos (a shift from scarcity to abundance) make the college lecture obsolete? Perhaps, but I see a few significant roadblocks:
- As Chris Anderson noted in The Long Tail, long tails require mechanisms for finding interesting or useful items. Search tools, recommendation engines, and referrals from friends are necessary to help people find items of value in the long tail of whatever. We’ll need to see such tools (and powerful ones) before the long tail of online lectures can displace face-to-face lectures.
- Not only can it be challenging to find something relevant in a long tail, but it can also be difficult to evaluate its quality. When the long tail consists of artifacts of pop culture (movies, music, and so on), evaluating is relatively easy: Do you like what you hear or see? Do your friends like it? But evaluating the quality of a source of information like an online lecture requires information literacy and critical thinking skills that students might not have. Sure, online lectures from NYU are likely to be on target, but how do you go about evaluating a site like the Khan Academy?
- Robert Talbert mentioned a few things that online lectures do better than face-to-face lectures, like letting viewers pause and rewind and watch on mobile devices at times of their choosing. But are there aspects of face-to-face lectures that are both significant (perhaps critical) and also missing from online lectures? For example, watching a 60-minute lecture online takes a fair amount of motivation for a student. Might being in the same room as a speaker provide a level of motivation that’s hard to replicate online, at least for some students? (The reliance on highly self-motivated students appears to me to be the biggest weakness in the DIY U idea, although I haven’t read Kamenetz’s book yet, so I could be wrong. However, Robert seems to be with me on this.)
- There’s also the accreditation issue. According to TechCrunch, Bill Gates “believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it.” Until we have systems in place to give that kind of credit, the traditional college diploma will still be very important to students. And since those diplomas are handed out by college and universities, that puts a lot of power in the hands of faculty. How comfortable might a student be in skipping linear algebra class and catching a Gil Strang lecture online when Professor Strang isn’t the one handing out grades?
- I’m a big fan of the explanatory power of a lecture provided it’s a time for telling. However, as Robert Talbert tweeted, “Bill Gates said that in five years the best LECTURES will come from the web. Not the best ‘education.’ Big diff.” There’s a lot more to learning than just hearing someone explain something really well. Students need opportunities to test and receive feedback on their understanding to refine their learning over time. Some of that testing and feedback can come through other learners, but it helps to have an expert in the mix from time to time, too.
What do you think? Do you see any of these five potential roadblocks as potentially significant? Any of them not really relevant? Should I just go and read DIY U before I post on this topic again?
Lots more on Shirky’s Chapter 4 later, including a couple of big problems I have with the chapter.
Image: “Empty” by Flickr user Shaylor, Creative Commons licensed