James Galvin

Dvorak writes about another podcasting lecturer, this one from Bradford University in England:

Students will ask questions about lectures via text message, which will be answered in Dr Ashraf’s blog.

The lecturer has also been putting his appointment times online so students can check if he is available or book a meeting without coming into the university.

I’m delighted to see this kind of progress being made. James Bowen’s lecture podcasts in UCC were discussed Damien Mulley’s blog last month, and some people such as Adrian Weckler believed that it would lead to a reduced attendance at lectures, and thus more people failing in exams. Having experienced first-hand the benefits of Bowen’s podcasts and well-organised and readily available notes, I have to disagree fully with Adrian’s view. There are two types of students - those who attend lectures, and those who don’t. Those dilligent individuals who attend their Friday morning web programming classes will surely not change their colours simply because there is a file they can download online.

Unfortunately for me, I was born into the latter category and in my four years at UCC I’d say I could count the total number of lectures I attended on my fingers and toes. I know that the university should not have to cater for this degree of laziness, but when the goal is to educate, nobody can deny that we are better served by an organised collection of notes readily available online. Ironically, it was my interest in computers that ultimately doomed my education in computer science.

I wonder how much stress it would cause if the university declared that all lecturers must put their notes online. Some of my lecturers didn’t even have a website. Taking it a step futher, how difficult would it be to have all lectures recorded? All it takes, essentially, is a few clicks of buttons, and all of the valuable information that our tired, sieve-like brains don’t capture is gathered by a safety net that can be accessed at any time in the future, in a 13meg file. Accompanied by the notes so that you can read along, I can think of no better way to educate. So what if a couple of people decide not to show up due to the redundancy of the occasion - the underlying aim is to educate, and impeccable attendance is not a requirement.

Whats more, I’m sick of making excuses about how “I’m sorry I was lazy for four years, I’m sorry I didn’t go in” - if I had my day over again, I wouldn’t even bother wasting those ten hours that I did spend dozing off in the Boole basement listening to some guy read out his notes. Why not just give me the notes, and I’ll read them myself? I have better things to be doing - like working. Do you realise how expensive it is to go to university? With or without a grant - it is crippling if you don’t have Daddy paying your way for you. Money aside - the experience that I gained working IT-related jobs while I should have been attending lectures will prove far more useful than the VRML that I missed out on. In my ideal University 2.0, there would be no reason why I couldn’t have the best of both worlds - come home to find todays lecture accompanied by the notes up on the web. Text the prof with a question here or there, book a meeting with him for next week sometime.

You might say “bullshit, James, if you didn’t bother to get up in the morning then you won’t be wasting your time downloading large mp3s on your sucky 64k” and you could be right - but I would bring my USB stick into college some evening and I would download everything, and then when the frantic cramming sets in around May, I would reap the benefits of this accessible education. I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but I can honestly say that the only thing that has separated me from the 1.1ers is the fact that they always had the notes, and I didn’t. True, I have only myself to blame, photocopiers are easy to come by, but this is 2006 and I really don’t want to be scurrying around like a 1997er. I shouldn’t even have to know what a photocopier looks like - they became obsolete along with Whigfield and Scatman John.

My sickle is sharpened, and my hammer weighs heavily, urging me to take this declaration a step further - once we have our podcasts and our lecture notes uploaded, why not put them all into a big huge directory and make them publicly accessible? I realise this probably sounds very naive, so please, do me a favour and explain it to me. Why is it that these not-for-profit institutes of learning horde their material behind closed doors? Its easy enough to unearth some PDF’s or PPT’s from some guy in MIT if you google hard enough, but I want RSS feeds - I want Wikis, I want Education 2.0 Social Education. I’m interested in Artificial Intelligence - I want my feed reeder to beep everytime some MIT professor updates his podcast, or uploads his notes to his website. I don’t want to suffer anymore because my own lecturer is useless. And I want to find out once and for all if those Arts students are really talking shit or not - I want to see their notes; I want to read their course material. I want all this stuff to be accessible to the common man, for the good of education. Patent pending, Tom.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 27th, 2006 at 0:36 am and is filed under General, Internet, UCC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.