Yesterday we had an excellent guest lecture, despite the fact that the LCD projector failed and so did the video camera. I’d even tested the camera beforehand, though we couldn’t get into the room to test the projector. But to no avail.
To compose my introduction, I tried to find my review of the speaker’s book, and it had vanished off the website where once it was. Only the Internet Archive saved me.
That’s two-and-a-half failures out of three, technology. When we welcome our new robot overlords, we’re going to find out they’re just as incompetent as the human ones.
Tangential further notes:
This seems an appropriate place to note that once a term my laptop, which I use for Keynote presentations, mysteriously fails to perform despite my having checked beforehand, every day, to make sure the presentation runs. So I give the lecture the old-fashioned way. (Students, interestingly, almost never complain about this, even on anonymous evaluation forms.)
It also seems an appropriate place to note that you can see that guest speaker, Ha-Joon Chang, of Cambridge, give a talk similar to the one I failed to record on YouTube.
21 comments
April 9, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Benjamin Rooney
Technology makes me sad some days, thinking about all the wasted potential it really represents.
Then the history professor* whose daily writings I access from my home sends me a lecture by a guy from Cambridge, which I can also view right here on my very own personal couch.
And then I love technology again.
*I’m unsure whether this is correct. Are you a professor? A teacher? Adjunct faculty? Your “about” says you teach history at a university, but that could also describe a chatty, nostalgic janitor.
April 9, 2008 at 12:49 pm
KRK
that could also describe a chatty, nostalgic janitor
Now that would be an awesome blog.
Disclaimer: comment not intended in any way to suggest that EotAW isn’t itself awesome.
April 9, 2008 at 1:06 pm
eric
Are you a professor?
Yes, both of us are. And thanks, that comment cheered me.
Nice disclaimer, KRK.
April 9, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Rob_in_Hawaii
There is simply no feeling equal to that of experiencing a “technology failure” in front of an expectant audience — be it as a visiting lecturer, during a conference presentation, or (God help you) at a job talk. The flop sweat, the panicky tone that creeps into your voice, the awkward attempts at humor.
I still haven’t gotten over the brilliant lecture that I was set to give in another instructor’s class several years ago. In it each and every slide in the carousel was in upside down and backwards. An hour of nostalgia over America’s classic ballparks was reduced to about forty-five minutes of fumbling, apologizing, and cursing. The other fifteen minutes consisted of me rhapsodizing about what it must have been like to have actually sat in the stands at Ebbett’s Field or Sportsman’s Park — but having the students IMAGINE it because I couldn’t actually show them a picture of the place.
Perhaps it’s the memory of that day, more than anything else, that keeps me from experimenting more with technology in the classroom.
April 9, 2008 at 3:49 pm
charlieford
“So I give the lecture the old-fashioned way. (Students, interestingly, almost never complain about this, even on anonymous evaluation forms.)”
I had a colleague who was praised for his “unique and interesting” teaching style on an anonymous evaluation, ie, using chalk and talking. That was more than 10 years ago. (And no, they weren’t being sarcastic.)
My experience is students are no longer “wowed” by technology. Nothing we do in the classroom can compete with what they have on their computer games. Besides, the effect of the new–think of the way air cav was supposed to terrify the Viet Cong–wears off very quickly.
It all comes down to minds melding. Yum.
April 9, 2008 at 3:57 pm
eric
Honestly, I feel better about myself when I do the lecture without all the son et lumière. But I don’t think the students would like it for the whole term. Besides, I don’t think your job is supposed to make you feel better about yourself.
April 9, 2008 at 4:07 pm
A White Bear
“Using chalk and talking” struck me as pretty funny. That’s all I do. Friends keep urging me to use handouts, movies, internet things, etc., during the classroom, and it gives me the willies. We use wikis for part of the writing requirement, but otherwise, it’s all chalk and talk in the AWB classroom. I love it! They love it! No fiddling with dongles and cables and things!
Once, for a poetry class, I brought in my laptop and speakers and played songs, whose lyrics we discussed, and frankly, I hated it. It was a nice break for them, but I longed to be drawing diagrams on the board, writing out etymologies and stuff. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t get what all the fuss about multimedia was about.
I discussed with a friend a problem about discussing early 20th-c men’s fashions, which are a major subject of a book we’re reading next week, wondering if I should practice drawing different kinds of men’s suits and stuff so I could do it in class, and my friend looked at me like I was crazy. “Can’t you just, like, project pictures from the internet?” Hmph.
April 9, 2008 at 7:13 pm
charlieford
I don’t think we can know for sure what students would like better, if we had used a different style or mode of teaching. But I think it’s inarguable that people like diversity. The same old thing gets old when its all the same. Technology’s attractions–or much of it–was parasitic on this fact. Now that power point’s become all but ubiquitous, it allows inveterate retrograde recidivists such as Bear (or myself) to slip in and appeal with a “Hey! Kids! Check this out! It’s weird, it’s fun–it’s learning just like Herman Melville learned! Don’t you like it?” What if everyone moved to the chalk and talk? Who knows? It would take away a small bit of what’s interesting about my method, but I do know, when I was a kid, nobody got all excited and pumped because the teacher was pulling out the film-strip projector.
I’m also a big believer in the “do-what-works-best-for-you” school of teaching. Besides ensuring there will be diversity across the classes the student takes from hour to hour, it also is best for the student when the teacher is comfortable (and hopefully even excited). If the teacher likes the bells and whisteles, then by all means. But if she doesn’t, I want her to do what works for her, so she isn’t distracted and worried. Who cares if the map she draws free-hand is less accurate than one she projects? If it works to illustrate her point, it’s good enough. Let her concentrate on the points she wants to make and the questions she wants to ask.
Finally, as you allude to above, Eric, it can be very nice to walk into a class and know that there’s nothing that can stop or slow you down. No failure of technology, no electrical outage, can stop me. If there’s some natural light, I can still use the board even if the lights go out. If there isn’t, in many of my classes I know what I’m doing well-enough to keep going in the pitch dark. It’s amazingly liberating.
April 10, 2008 at 5:03 am
Matt Weiner
I still haven’t gotten over the brilliant lecture that I was set to give in another instructor’s class several years ago.
Substituting in other people’s classes is often fraught.
April 10, 2008 at 5:51 am
eric
Also, the internet? Not so great (language warning).
April 10, 2008 at 8:46 am
andrew
it can be very nice to walk into a class and know that there’s nothing that can stop or slow you down
I had a class in a room that never seemed to have enough chalk. After having to raid empty classrooms a couple of times just to find a piece of chalk, the instructor started bringing her own.
April 10, 2008 at 5:15 pm
urbino
I remember when chalk holders — like mechanical pencils, but for chalk — were the latest thing in teaching technology. The teachers that had them wouldn’t let them out of their site.
April 10, 2008 at 6:52 pm
A White Bear
I carry my own chalk in my pocket to every class, because without chalk, I am lost. I even bought whiteboard markers for the classrooms with whiteboards.
April 11, 2008 at 5:06 pm
matt w
I’ve taught at at least one school where it was policy that you had to bring your own whiteboard markers (issued from your department). Currently I bring a whiteboard marker from the department because the markers that are already in the classroom all write faint. Partly because some of them are the markers I abandoned there when they started to write faint.
I hate whiteboards.
April 11, 2008 at 5:33 pm
eric
Whiteboards are truly evil.
I carry one of those little chalk-holder things and my own chalk.
April 11, 2008 at 6:33 pm
andrew
I have fond memories of whiteboards. My parents put up whiteboards in the hallway outside the room my sister and I shared – what later became the hallway between our rooms, when we each got our own room – for us to play around with. I think all we did was draw and write messages.
April 11, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Galvinji
I carry my own chalk in my pocket to every class, because without chalk, I am lost.
Ah, this brings back fond memories of having to buy my own chalk at one of the places where I was an adjunct (I think it was CCNY). Otherwise no one would have been able to spell the terms from World History that I was mispronouncing.
Whiteboards are truly evil.
They are especially evil if you are left-handed, making them instantly self-erasing.
April 11, 2008 at 8:29 pm
ari
They are especially evil if you are left-handed, making them instantly self-erasing.
I must admit that I’ve never considered this. Part of my prejudice against such a clearly defective class, I guess.
April 11, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
Don’t mock the sinister, Ari. We have powers you can’t know.
As for Eric, I’m surprised he doesn’t insist that his students carry individual slates and make their marks there, on pain of being beaten with a switch.
April 11, 2008 at 9:24 pm
ari
What in god’s name makes you think he doesn’t? You haven’t been listening to his propaganda, have you? We’ve talked about this, Tweety. Come on.
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