Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

I had recently come to the same conclusion. All information coming from external sources only goes into working memory, and does not get transferred into long-term highly-connected cortical connections. The lecture (or rather the crash course tutorial) is still pretty good for dishing out lots of factual knowledge, but then you have to let the students think/practice/explain things in their own words if you want proper connections to be made.

I can tell you "In the absence of friction, the total mechanical energy of a system is conserved", and you can commit this message to memory, but to truly understand this you have to see this concept in 10-15 different situations. Only then can the abstract statement be understood. The cool part about physics is that you actually get a little //knowledge buzz// at that point...

My question to you all, is a book any different from a lecture? On the one hand, you are still "sitting there" while someone else tries to "pour" knowledge into you. On the other hand it is pretty good to see things clearly explained on paper (story telling instinct?) and, just like the Khan videos, you can "rewind" a few pages back, if you don't understand something. I would particularly like to hear the younger crown on this one: are books still cool?

BTW, David Hestenes has lots of cool papers out: http://www.google.com/search?q=David+Hestenes+test+filetype:...

> He came up with a law of motion to explain how two balls of different weights, dropped from the same height, hit the ground simultaneously.

I've been thinking about this for a while.

The two balls hit the ground at the "same time" because relative to the earth, they are about the same mass (ball #1 is only 1/2 the mass of ball #2, and the difference between that and the mass of the earth is negligible).

Once you start making ball #1 and ball #2 massively different, one of the balls begins to attract the earth itself more than the other ball.

For example...

1) Take a basketball, drop it. Measure the time.

2) Take a miniture blackhole, drop it. Measure the time.

While earth's pull will be the same on both the basketball and the blackhole, the blackhole's pull on earth will be much much grater than the basketball's and hence the additive acceleration will be larger.

But, if you drop them at the same time, next to each other, things will even out since the earth will move towards them both as it moves towards the one.

What do I win?

Below is the key concept here. The quicker education administrators and teachers realize this the better off we'll be.

>>"With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."

>>Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don't have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.

>>"It used to be just be the 'sage on the stage,' the source of knowledge and information," he says. "We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information."

>>Mazur sees himself now as the "guide on the side" – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

I don't really understand why lectures have continued since the advent of affordable video technology. Every year the departments prepare unique lecture series and deliver them to new students, sometimes the same lecture twice a week because the numbers are so large, interacting very little with the audience, and expecting students to really engage with the new ideas they're exploring this term.

From the student's perspective having a video from some lecturer at Yale or wherever would be just as effective.

Lectures to small classes of say 10 are a different story, but on the scale of modern UK university courses it seems like one of the most inefficient systems imaginable.

Lectures can be amazing if executed by the right person. The problem, as stated in the article, is not related to lectures. It's related to the University and teaching system as whole.

Students come their to get the degree and not to push science forward. Only a small fraction are actually interested in the science. The rest are just looking to get good grades.

I have always thought of lectures not as a way to convey information but rather enthusiasm.

A dull (or bad in other ways) lecturer almost always turns me off to a topic. A lecturer who is excited about the topic always makes me want to know more about something.

I remember a lecture about insect flight muscles I listened to in 2005. Before that I never really thought about muscles. For a whole day after that lecture I wanted to study muscles as my research topic.

> Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.

Even better, find the greatest lecturers out there, get them to do it once and put it on the web.

It's (well) known that learning by teaching beats learning by doing which in turn beats learning by listening (Something Confucius might have said. Modern citations welcome.) The fact that lectures still exist must somehow be due to economic necessities.

A great lecturer can inspire and spark a thirst for knowledge inside students.. In my opinion there is no way lectures will be completely replaced or lost. However, learning by doing is probably more efficient in this information soaked age so I wouldn't be surprised if more integrated labs / discussions courses started showing up.

Ironically, blue color trades have known that since their inception. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc all mix book work with hands on training. Why shouldn't all academics follow that proven method (after all, MD's do - can you imagine going to a doctor that only leaned from a book?).

Lectures are a great idea, when the professor is an expert talking about something only they know about. If they are just rehashing Newton's laws 101, there's no need. It's an outdated tradition dating back to when all university classes taught stuff that was cutting edge.

One thing that my physics professors have consistently said is that students who do well on homework do well in the course. I think it's because the students who are motivated to learn the material do the homework to test their own understanding. My own experience is that time spent in lecture doesn't really affect these students. In fact, they would only show up for most lectures if attendance was mandatory. The students who want to learn, learn. Unfortunately, lectures don't exactly motivate learning. They just seem like meetings where you discuss what's on the next exam.

if every lecturer had the skill of Feynman, though, there would be no problem.

I think a lot of what current traditional schools do is merely an echo or inertial continuance of practices that at best made sense hundreds of years ago. They developed in a time where the technology landscape was more limited, there were fewer alternative methods, and the economic competitive context was less global and more local. Now we have the technology to record the best video/audio lectures on a given subject once and mass distribute them for free. We can create software that automatically grades massive amounts of test and homework submissions. We can push essay submissions into systems that automatically check for potential plagiarism against large databases of previously written papers. Instead of dead paper resumes we can have online portfolios of actual work products and videos showing people directly exercising particular skills in real time, in order to convey legitimacy and make purported abilities tangible. With Google we can quickly lookup trivial facts on the go as needed rather than having to memorize them. All of the above frees up humans to spend more time learning fundamental ideas and concentrating on their own health, wealth and happiness and less on mindlessly carrying out superficial traditions, doing makework or bowing to arbitrary external authority. We can be more real. And do more, faster and better.