A new survey, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute, reveals students’ preference for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for later viewing. There’s more about the study here, with a focus on the financial costs to universities for doing this. I’m skeptical about “lecture capture” technology as a workable solution for delivering useful content in a way that’s financially profitable. Personally, I’m more interested in the bottom-up, DIY-side of what this means in terms of pedagogy and technology. more...
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I’m generally inclined to agree with Vint Cerf’s twist on the famous anarchist slogan: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
Nonetheless, many of us—myself included—end up using slides anyway. Done right, they can be a very good thing.
A fellow Minnesota grad student, Wes Longhofer, has developed a unique style of PowerPointing that really pushes the technology in a fun, creative way. I asked Wes if I could share one of his presentations here, and he said yes: Download the PDF here.
I’ll mostly let the slides speak for themselves, but a few notes:
- This is for an introductory Political Sociology class. As you’ll see, the readings for this class were Domhoff’s Who Rules America?, John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness, and Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”1
- All frames within each slide are displayed at once in the PDF, though you can easily picture how the various arrows, highlights and questions on each slide appear one-at-a-time during the presentation. Because of all the crazy fonts & images Wes uses, distributing the original PowerPoint file isn’t really an option.
- There are four movie clips embedded in the presentation (obviously they’re not included in the PDF—you’ll just see a placeholder image). In order, they are:
- A clip from the film “Wag the Dog” about political spin.
- A clip from “Century of Self” on the role of psychoanalysts and the CIA in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
- A Reagan campaign ad from 1984.
- An anti-Howard Dean ad from 2004 about “latte-drinking” liberal “freak shows.”
- This particular class meets only once a week in 2.5 hour sessions, in case you were wondering how so much material could possibly be covered in one class.
And Wes puts this kind of care into every lecture he prepares. (Is anyone surprised he won our department’s Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award this year?)
Footnotes
- Of special value to Wes & I as we are both native Kansans. [↩]
Last night I watched the DNC live online and I had a very odd thought: the politics of watching this online was getting in the way of my enjoyment…of a political convention? Well, given the fact that conventions focus more on personalities & life stories than political issues, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of my political thoughts had to do with two technology issues surrounding the online broadcast: Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (being used to stream the video online) and high speed internet policies in the US.
At the recent ASA meetings in Boston, I spoke with several colleagues about some of the interesting stuff going on in sociology and social media/digital media/Internet technology/fill-in-your-favorite-term here. In those conversations, I heard a familiar refrain. One colleague remarked in reference to a presentation I’d done recently on using technology in the classroom, “I wish I didn’t even know about all that. It’s all too much!” Another colleague lamented, “I have no time to learn about the Internet. I work 80 weeks as it is, and I have a family!”
I can sympathize. For those of us working under the usual constraints of a publish-or-perish academic career, multiplied by the demands of a (family) or personal life beyond academia, keeping up with the latest developments in technology can seem like a daunting – and unnecessary – task. I’ll write more about what I see as the “necessity” of it some other time, but for now, I just want to talk about how it might be less daunting.
Some of the new technology out there can make keeping up with the rest of the information possible. Here’s one tool, “RSS,” explained in “plain english” along with some handy visual aids (about 3 minutes from the folks at CommonCraft):
I’m generally inclined to agree with Vint Cerf’s twist on the famous anarchist slogan: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
Nonetheless, many of us—myself included—end up using slides anyway. Done right, they can be a very good thing.
A fellow Minnesota grad student, Wes Longhofer, has developed a unique style of PowerPointing that really pushes the technology in a fun, creative way. I asked Wes if I could share one of his presentations here, and he said yes: Download the PDF here.
I’ll mostly let the slides speak for themselves, but a few notes:
- This is for an introductory Political Sociology class. As you’ll see, the readings for this class were Domhoff’s Who Rules America?, John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness, and Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”1
- All frames within each slide are displayed at once in the PDF, though you can easily picture how the various arrows, highlights and questions on each slide appear one-at-a-time during the presentation. Because of all the crazy fonts & images Wes uses, distributing the original PowerPoint file isn’t really an option.
- There are four movie clips embedded in the presentation (obviously they’re not included in the PDF—you’ll just see a placeholder image). In order, they are:
- A clip from the film “Wag the Dog” about political spin.
- A clip from “Century of Self” on the role of psychoanalysts and the CIA in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
- A Reagan campaign ad from 1984.
- An anti-Howard Dean ad from 2004 about “latte-drinking” liberal “freak shows.”
- This particular class meets only once a week in 2.5 hour sessions, in case you were wondering how so much material could possibly be covered in one class.
And Wes puts this kind of care into every lecture he prepares. (Is anyone surprised he won our department’s Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award this year?)
Footnotes
- Of special value to Wes & I as we are both native Kansans. [↩]
Last night I watched the DNC live online and I had a very odd thought: the politics of watching this online was getting in the way of my enjoyment…of a political convention? Well, given the fact that conventions focus more on personalities & life stories than political issues, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of my political thoughts had to do with two technology issues surrounding the online broadcast: Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (being used to stream the video online) and high speed internet policies in the US.
At the recent ASA meetings in Boston, I spoke with several colleagues about some of the interesting stuff going on in sociology and social media/digital media/Internet technology/fill-in-your-favorite-term here. In those conversations, I heard a familiar refrain. One colleague remarked in reference to a presentation I’d done recently on using technology in the classroom, “I wish I didn’t even know about all that. It’s all too much!” Another colleague lamented, “I have no time to learn about the Internet. I work 80 weeks as it is, and I have a family!”
I can sympathize. For those of us working under the usual constraints of a publish-or-perish academic career, multiplied by the demands of a (family) or personal life beyond academia, keeping up with the latest developments in technology can seem like a daunting – and unnecessary – task. I’ll write more about what I see as the “necessity” of it some other time, but for now, I just want to talk about how it might be less daunting.
Some of the new technology out there can make keeping up with the rest of the information possible. Here’s one tool, “RSS,” explained in “plain english” along with some handy visual aids (about 3 minutes from the folks at CommonCraft):