Lectures, Backchannels, and Interactive Classrooms

While I was looking around the web to see what other educators had to say about Drive I found this blog called "The Thinking Stick," by Jeff Ultecht.

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/the-evolution-of-the-lecture/

Anyway, he advocates the integration of laptops, twitter conversations, real-time classroom chats during lectures.  He says that lectures are no longer for content delivery, but rather for "inspiring, telling stories, and pushing thinking."   Students can (and do) look up information on their own- that's not what lectures should be about. People just get bored listening to people drone on or repeat bullet points off of PowerPoint slides.  And if they are bored, they will not be engaged.

Ultecht suggests breaking lectures into roughly 10 minutes of speech followed by 3 minute conversation segments, during which time a teacher can check the chat room feed, etc. and respond and adapt based on student interaction. Later, students can have the chat room conversation as a resource for notes.  Also, the "conversation" can be carried on well after the initial lecture is complete (and, if I were to hazard a guess, might pick up in intensity as exam dates loom ever-closer).

Ultecht notes that the overwhelming success of TED talks is due to their brevity.  Capped at 18 minutes, it is perfect amount of time to deliver a compelling message, but not to long to lose the attention of the audience. After 10-20 minutes or so, our brains need to process information, hence:  Lectures should either be  1) Short or 2) Interactive (this is where back channeling comes in).  

Ultecht not only allows laptops during lectures but encourages them.  He goes a step beyond this, and provides "backchannels" hyperlinked documents prior to each lecture and tells people that "if you're going to wander off, here are some links to visit and to be thinking about" 

In the comments, someone brought up the point that encouraging students to be on twitter during class was a complete disaster waiting to happen. 

Ultecht's response was that "if you are zoned out, does it really matter if you are tweeting on an unrelated topic or doodling in your notebook?"     

I was thinking about this today while watching a student who kept falling asleep. We don't allow laptops in our classrooms, but this student might as well have been checking twitter throughout the lecture.  

I tend to side more with the person who thinks enabling twitter is a very. bad. idea.   But,  I am toying around with creating a "Google Doc"  for each lecture that students in the classroom to collaboratively take notes.  It's a way to "backchannel," and can be a way for students to continue discussing the lecture and adding to the notes after the lecture is over.