This in The Times today:
‘THE days of vast lecture halls filled with bored, hungover students falling asleep may be over. In what is being likened to the printing revolution of the 16th century, podcasts may soon replace lectures. Forcing undergraduates out of bed to visit campuses is not the best way to teach, researchers have found. Academics are investigating how they might use digital technology and MP3 players to help students. Lecturers are already using podcasts to supplement lectures. Harold Fricker, a lecturer at Coventry, says: “There is a shift equivalent to the Gutenberg presses of the 1500s.” A trial podcast mixing rap and information will be discussed today.’
Three objections…
Firstly, there can be no comparison with the revolution in the printing press. The podcast is an extension of the capabilities of existing technologies, and is quite insignificant against the real modern information revolution, which was the internet revolution. Such sensationalism is little more than an advertising pitch. Secondly, which ‘researchers have found’ that ‘[f]orcing undergraduates out of bed to visit campuses is not the best way to teach’? Presumably the same academic cowboys advocating the use of podcasts as a substitute for proper teaching. Thirdly, the use to which the podcast will be put: ‘mixing rap and information’ is at the forefront of imbecility, precisely the kind of lowest common denominator teaching that has been so detrimental to the nation’s learning.
It reminds me of one of my favourite horror stories, recounted by Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard in their 1997 book Class Act. They tell of how the London Institute of Education asserted that schools are too often guilty of ‘legitimising one popular view of mathematics’. Maths is oppressive and consistent with Western cultural and educational imperialism; it should be replaced by ‘ethnomathematics’. Our everyday experiences are what maths is really about, not the pedagogic instructions of a teacher. As the headmaster in Lambeth who appointed an expert in Nigerian cooking, with no experience of maths, to teach maths in his school put it: ‘It’s real life maths with Ibo cookery – transferable maths.’
The progressive classroom and lecture hall have been the laboratory for too many failed projects. Let’s not make the putative neo-progressive non-classroom and non-auditorium the laboratory for any more.