I've been critical of the contest for best lecturer because it focuses on style and not on substance [TV Ontario's Best Lecturers]. A few months ago I posted the names and areas of expertise of the three judges. Here's who they picked.
You can see the winning lecture at Ontario's Best Lecturer 2008!. A lot of it discusses naturalism and supernaturalism. Listen for yourself and see if you agree with the judges selection.
6 comments :
i thought the judges only picked the top 10 and the winner was determined by audience voting.
He's got a funny accent. He kept talking about "a boat," but I didn't see any boat.
This is really in response to the earlier post about the competition. Larry says accuracy is the only thing that matters in a lecture. But if that were the case, the best lecture would consist of reading the textbook out loud to the students.
This guy may not be much better than many other lecturers, but he's done a number of important things. He's decided on a few key points he wants the students to grasp. He's relating the ideas to issues that matter to them (yes, he's framed the ideas for the audience). His speaking style is dynamic, not dreary. He's putting a human face on the ideas; the audience sees that he cares about what he's telling them.
rosie redfield says,
Larry says accuracy is the only thing that matters in a lecture. But if that were the case, the best lecture would consist of reading the textbook out loud to the students.
I say no such thing. What I say is that accuracy is the fundamental requirement in a university lecture. If the lecturer isn't conveying accurate information then nothing else matters—it's a bad lecture.
One we've decided that the information being conveyed is correct then, and only then, can we pick out the best lecturer based on other criteria.
The top three requirements for a good university lecture are accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy. This does not mean that numbers 4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10 don't matter.
This guy may not be much better than many other lecturers, but he's done a number of important things. He's decided on a few key points he wants the students to grasp. He's relating the ideas to issues that matter to them (yes, he's framed the ideas for the audience). His speaking style is dynamic, not dreary. He's putting a human face on the ideas; the audience sees that he cares about what he's telling them.
That's fine, but is the information he's conveying accurate? Are the students learning anything important?
Rosie, you obviously listened to the lecture. What's the most important thing you learned?
Actually I've only watched the first 5 minutes or so. (Rather ironically, I don't really have time to watch the whole thing because I need to prepare my own lectures for the coming week.)
The most important thing that's happening in this class may be that the students are unlearning something they thought they knew.
Many students come to university thinking that both their religion and their schooling have provided them with many absolute truths, and that acquiring more absolute truths is the main the role of a university education. But really, the most important accomplishment of a university education may be getting students to to recognize that they (and the people they trust) might be wrong.
Like Rosie Redfield, I only listened to five minutes or so, but not because I had a lecture to prepare, more because I felt he was going round in circles and not saying much. In other words I was bored, and I thought if this was the best, what on earth must the worst have been like?
He hadn't reached anything that could be assessed by Larry's criterion of accuracy, i.e. in the part I listened to he didn't seem to say anything that I would call either a fact or a non-fact.
Nonetheless, I'd like to respond to Larry's point that
The top three requirements for a good university lecture are accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy. This does not mean that numbers 4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10 don't matter.
In a sense I agree, but I don't think it's so simple. I'm very fond of an aphorism by Keith Laidler, formerly Professor of Chemistry at Ottawa, who said
Correctness, cogency, clarity: these three; but the greatest of these is clarity. (Keith said he modified it from a saying by Peter Medawar, but I looked up the original and found Keith's version to be much better, so I prefer to attribute it to him.)
So, he puts correctness first, but says that clarity is more important, and I agree. This is because without clarity you cannot tell whether something is correct or not. Errors in the scientific literature can always be corrected afterwards if they are clearly expressed, and almost certainly will be corrected if anyone cares about the point being made. Statements that are too vague to be fully understood (of which there are a great many) are much more difficult to handle because one cannot tell whether they are correct or not.
I'm oversimplifying as well, because my argument applies best to printed information, and you are explicitly discussing oral information. Nonetheless, I feel it still applies: although it may be difficult for students to correct errors their teachers make, it's not impossible, and if a lecture is clear, but wrong, the students have the possibility of checking other sources.
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