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Re: [Phys-L] book versus video versus lecture



I meant to say "_they_ either fix it or take it down" -- not to suggest that there would be an authority making those decisions, just that there would be a natural tendency toward improved materials. Sorry.
On 1/13/2014 6:53 PM, Philip Keller wrote:


Is there (or could there be) a website where teachers can post lecture notes, powerpoints, lab experiments, problems sets, simulations, activities -- all the kinds of things we use in our teaching, organized by subject with room for reviews, comments, suggestions for improvement, maybe even a "like" button. A teacher posts something, people give it bad reviews, lots of criticism, I either fix it or take it down. Or people give it great reviews, lots of "likes" and the next time someone is looking for a good powerpoint about, say, Carnot efficiency, they can search the site, find the activity they were interested in, see what others had to say, maybe try it themselves rather than re-invent the wheel.

Also, some teachers would become well known for creating good material, just like there are some who have created great applets.

Also, if it were up to me, I might say that you had to be a teacher to participate (current or former) and not a textbook publisher. Not sure why I think that.

Students would definitely be allowed in.

OK, that's all for now.

On 1/13/2014 4:25 PM, John Denker wrote:
Executive summary: To a first approximation, the question is:
Do we have any credible evidence that the /process/ of
taking notes in class has pedagogical value???

=================

On 01/10/2014 12:55 PM, Donald Polvani made about 25 interesting
and useful observations. I would like to start by following up
on this one in particular:

No time was wasted writing something on the board, and we
students didn't waste our time (and divert our attention) by taking verbatim
notes. The workbook contained generous margins where students could enter
individual remarks, if desired
1) For some students, the act of taking notes during class is part
of their learning process.

Reportedly, the /process/ of taking notes is more important than the
final product. Giving these students prefabricated handouts would
yield a better product, but would defeat the pedagogical purpose,
since the /process/ is what counts.

2) There are some students who find that there is a choice: either
take notes *OR* pay close attention and think about what is going on.

For these students, handouts are welcome. Handouts with generous
margins are ideal for taking the kind of notes that need to be
taken, i.e. notes on the notes, e.g. questions that require follow-
up and/or insights that were inadvertently omitted from the handout.

==================

I am 100% sure that strategy (2) works for some students.

To say the same thing the other way, there are some counselors and
some teachers who insist that strategy (1) is the only acceptable
strategy, and they try to push this strategy on all students ...
but I vehemently disagree with this. I've seen plennnnty of students
who followed strategy (2) with great success.

On the other hand, I am not ready to adopt the diametrically opposite
approach. I am not ready to push strategy (2) on all students. All
too often, the diametrical opposite of a mistake is also a mistake.

Personally, I do not understand strategy (1), but there are lots
of things in this world that are perfectly true, even though I
don't understand them.

We can however ask the question: Is there any credible evidence
that the /process/ of taking notes has significant pedagogical
value for some students? If so, what percentage of the students?
I guarantee it is less than 100%, but I am be willing to believe
it is nonzero.

It seems to me, it would be "relatively" easy to measure this.
All experiments on human subjects are wicked hard, but relatively
speaking, this should be on the less-hard end of the scale.

I poked around Google Scholar and did not immediately find any
existing data on this.

Before rushing off to measure this, we might want to ask some more
subtle questions. There are shades of gray, not a black-and-white
choice between "learning" and "no learning". I am willing to
believe that taking notes requires the student to pay attention
*at a low level* which is
a) better than nothing, better than sleeping or daydreaming, but
b) worse than seriously thinking about the material.

In other words, a tenth of a loaf is better than none.

However, I am a big-time optimist and idealist, so I have to ask:
Why not go for the whole loaf?

So IMHO the more interesting question is, for the students who have
been following strategy (1), to what extent can they be trained to
stop taking notes and start thinking more deeply about the material?

This touches on the trendy topic of "active engagement". Activity
is easy to quantify, but engagement is what counts. It seems to
me that robotic note-taking demands activity but prevents any real
engagement.

This also touches on the trendy idea that the lecture format is
ipso facto ineffective. Surely that is an oversimplification.
I am willing to believe that lousy lectures are ineffective,
and that most teachers don't have enough time to prepare a really
good lecture. However, there remains a mountain of objective
evidence that /some/ lectures are helpful. What evidence, you
ask? Let's start with the amount of traffic that Khan Academy
gets. Most of those are not what I would call good lectures,
not even close, but students swear they are helpful. Good students
and not-so-good students alike.

So the interesting question is not whether it is better to replace
note-taking with nothing. The question is whether it is better to
replace note-taking with serious real-time /thinking/ about the
material. Investigating this question will require teaching the
students how to properly carry out strategy (2).

This is relevant to the discussion of video versus lecture, for a
couple of reasons:
*) If you are pursuing strategy (1), unless you are a highly-skilled
stenographer, you cannot possibly take notes fast enough to keep
up with a live lecture. You could however keep up with a video
lecture, by making generous use of the pause button.
*) Conversely, if you are pursuing strategy (2), it is very likely
that some of the material will require very little thinking because
it is already familiar, while other bits of material will require
vastly more thinking. Use of the 2xPlay button and the pause
button allows for more and better thinking per unit time.

If anybody knows of any credible data on this, please speak up!

For that matter, if anybody has any anecdotes or personal testimony,
I'd be interested to hear that, too.

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