I gave a talk in the Shannon Consortium's Teaching on the Go series. Here's the first second third draft of the talk, I'd love more comments on it, and here's an mp3 of the talk.
Abstract
I’ve been teaching now for 9 years, at all levels. My tool of choice has been the slide deck, for 9 out of those 9 years. I don’t want to use this tool in lectures anymore, for reasons I will outline below. What alternatives are there, when both students and lecturers expect to give and receive information in bullets, on slides? More importantly, how does one teach a class of hundreds without slides?
Update: Liam Delaney's thoughts on the idea are here, and I've updated the talk to reflect his, Simon's, and Eugene's comments.
Update 2: Here are Ed Fidgeon-Kavanagh's thoughts on slideware usage: "Poor usage of Ppt does not mean Ppt is poor" http://bit.ly/bp3arE
Update 3: Here are Dr Eugene O'Loughlin's thoughts on slide usage: Some thoughts on PowerPoint usage, Part 1
Update 4: Here are some further thoughts on the ideas in Ed and Eugene's posts.
Update 5: Here are more of Dr O'Loughlin's thoughts on powerpoint usage.
Thanks for the comments Simon--you won't get any slides from the presentation though 🙂
The feedback issue isn't a big one for me, in large lectures of 500+ students it seems to work really well, and every UL student has a plethora of tutorials with well qualified MA-level Teaching Assistants, so that's not a problem either. My big issue here is that I feel students shouldn't be learning from slides, and lecturers shouldn't reduce their ideas to those slides, because its bad for educational outcomes.
The 'sales' idea really comes down to the tool, have a look at http://www.edwardtufte.com for a sense of why this is. Slideware is good for sales, for one way communication. I guess that's what I'm trying not to do as much. Of course I'll still be up on the stage, so to speak, but I don't want to be hammering down powerpoints all day either.
I think we can use mobile phones as feedback devices in large classes-do you use a mac? You could use the text message thing I've developed if you like, I'd be very interested to see how you find it helping or hindering your lecturing style.
The Christobal Conde interview in the New York Times was excellent, to understand how large companies can work somehow together to harness the benefit of lots of brains. Conde seems to be a big fan of providing information prior to the meeting, so that people have a chance to digest the basic points in advance. My experience in Ireland in business is that we behave the exact opposite. We often wait until the meeting happens to try and decide an ajenda, and then wait too long after that meeting to try to discuss the agenda. So that by the next meeting, everyone has forgotten and it all starts over again. Not very effective. A favourite book of mine is Douglas McGregor's classic from 1960, The Human Side of Enterprise. Anyhow, here is what Conde had to say about slideshows.
NY Times interview with Conde here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html
Cheers for the link Brian, will include in the main paper's next iteration. Perfect.
When I think about debate, two companies do spring to mind - Intel and DEC. I don't know if you have ever read Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive. But Andy was a maestro in confrontational exchanges of ideas I believe. He grew a moustache at one stage, to appear more intimidating I believe. But the point is, he did get a lot of debate going amongst his staff in meetings etc. Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation created a culture, which valued confrontation a lot too. A guy called Edgar H. Schein was a consultant psychologist to DEC and wrote a book, DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC. Schein believed that Olsen could not make changes necessary to DEC confrontational culture, and in the end the company started to rip itself apart. When I look at the stance of Andy Grove with a silicon wafer in the picture on this blog entry, you get the idea, of a guy who would demand results. Bear in mind, DEC was gobbled up by Intel in the early 1990s.
http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/03/management-by-intimidation.html
John Bailey is about the closest thing to an expert in team working and the Belbin method in Ireland I reckon. He organises the structural engineers society at Engineers Ireland. You can see his contact details here.
http://www.iei.ie/community/divisions/structures-construction/
You write in the paper, Sans Slideware, The best presentations are made by Apple’s Steve Jobs: a master salesman selling a brilliant product. Jobs does not need to explain, to convince; to review, synthesize, or evaluate an argument–Jobs just needs to sell you his stuff.
I would argue that Steve Jobs conducted a business which is very unlike DEC or Intel as I described it above. Jobs is notoriously possessive of the white board, and especially the markers to write on the white board. I don't know if Andy Grove or Ken Olsen believed in white boards so much, but they definitely were more inclusive of all people in the discussions. Once, some unfortunate person scribbled something on the white board in a meeting and Jobs exploded, 'You can't do that!' But the point I am making, is within meetings of company executives, Mr. Jobs is extremely dominant. However, if one reads Daniel Goleman's writing on the six styles of leader, you will find some very important leadership style - the visionary. The type of leader who can articulate some sort of vision, by which a larger number of people can target their efforts towards. When I worked at Dell computers in Limerick for instance, during the downturn of 2001, we still managed to ship 1.0 million units in the large quarter. The 'vision' for the next quarter was not to give ourselves a slap on the back, and well done - but to ship 1.1 million. The quarter after that, 1.2 million and so on. I am not sure if those numbers were entirely related to any strategy, as Dell had captured a huge amount of market share at that particular point, but it was a way for senior management to convey a vision for the future of the organisation. Pat Gelsinger was mentored within Intel by Andy Grove for instance, and here in an interview Gelsinger described how he went up against Bill Gates once.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9091319/The_Grill_Intel_s_Patrick_Gelsinger_on_the_hot_seat
Forgot to mention - check out 'House M.D.' TV series some time, for a very, very, very good idea of how Steve Jobs monopolises the white board in his group/team meetings. I scribbled something about Dr. Gregory House here.
http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/03/dr-house-in-wars.html
Bear in mind, that for Dr. House, the white board is a part of the problem definition (or diagnosis in medical speak) process. Very, very good TV series is House M.D. I own the entire DVD box sets of 5 seasons.
Hi Steven, I wonder if it can also work the opposite way - i.e. the lecture is used to introduce the subject, gets them to understand the main messages, provide examples. gets them thinking, and then the podcast follows afterwards where you are able to provide more detail?
I have always experienced huge value in the direct face to face experience as one of the best ways to convey ideas. It's not so good for detailed analysis however - at least for those of us who have memories like a sieve.
Like you, I hate slideware used inappropriately, or being used as a crutch. What's useful, I think, is that the lecturer gets quickly into a conversation with the audience, talks to them and not to the screen, uses slides advisedly and sparingly to add impact or to graphically demonstrate the message. The key thing is to grab their interest and make it memorable.
Hi Colm,
That's more or less how I do it now-the lecture is given as normal, with slides, etc, and then I put a podcast together afterwards on http://www.vimeo.com/stephenkinsella. The face to face thing is always best, and chalk and talk still works really well for 6-25 person classes. It's the 400-500 student classes I'm thinking about at the moment!