RE: Gedankenexperiments

["Rauber, Joel Phys" <RAUBERJ@mg.sdstate.edu>]

A comment or two concerning Leigh's comment

> I always try not to discourage a student from asking questions;
> questions are an essential ingredient even of my lectures to 200
> or more students. After all, if the element of interactivity is
> removed from the lecture, how does the lecture differ from a much
> cheaper, slicker, potentially error-free presentation on
> videotape?

Our state physics departments are basically being force into teaching 
advanced courses in a long distance mode for the most part; and there are 
some ruminations, due to costs of LD education, to doing these more along 
the lines of recording videotapes of lectures. (I fantasize about the day a 
bean counter realizes its cheaper to pay a professor at each campus to teach 
Classical Mechanics rather than buy all the fancy equipment and pay all the 
computer and electronic support people to keep it running, this of course 
depends upon having a low salary scale).  At any rate, Leigh's musing above 
is of more than rhetorical interest to me and is something I've thought 
about.

The difference between a video-tape and a less than optimally interactive 
lecture: I think is the same as the difference between listening to a CD of 
a live performance and a studio version of the same music.  There is a 
difference.

As a student, I can not conceive of learning off of the sterile environment 
of a videotape; I want a live person up there, someone who cares, even if 
just minimally. I want them even if I have to wait tell the end of the 
period for a Q&A time, or even if I have to get questions answered in office 
hours, or even from TA's.

There is an essential human element in the teaching/learning enterprise. 
 Videotapes are not very motivational . . .

Blah blah blah,  I'll end my tirade here, Leigh's comment just struck a 
cord, or was that a sensitive nerve.

Joel


(My attitude to Star Dreck