
Introducing the Microlecture Format - ph0rque
http://www.openeducation.net/2009/03/08/online-education-introducing-the-microlecture-format/
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mechanical_fish
I've been waiting for people to figure this out.

It's not just kids who have shorter attention spans. Though I am blessed with
friends who still call me "young man", I'm no longer a kid, and I'm a veteran
of many years of lecture-based courses. But that era is over. There's no
longer any technical reason to deliver lectures in uninterrupted fifty-minute
blocks. And it turns out that they only reason I ever liked that format is
that I didn't have alternatives.

I've attended so, so many physics lectures. They break naturally into chunks:
Some scene-setting ("let's talk about conservation of momentum in two
dimensions"), proposing a problem ("here's an ice rink with two hockey pucks
that collide"), a derivation (equation, equation, chalk dust, erasure,
equation, more chalk dust, fix the sign error), a summary ("look, momentum is
conserved! And we can draw the following general lesson..."), questions from
the audience, and finally a bunch of homework problems.

How great it would be to have each of these chunks be recorded as separate
bits of video. You could play through the scene-setting and the summary
multiple times. You could play through the derivation at higher speed, slowing
down or repeating the bits where the prof makes a subtle point but speeding
through the parts which are obvious to you. You can skip the student questions
that you already understand but play through the subtle ones more than once.

About the only disadvantage of this way of learning is that it's kind of
isolating. It would be nice to combine it with lots of lab-type gatherings
where all the students can join together and feel like a team.

\---

[1] I had a few professors who avoided using chalkboards. They would provide
handouts with the day's derivations and equations on them, then use an
overhead projector with slides. (This was all before Powerpoint was widely
available in academia.)

This was a mixed bag. It worked okay, but it wasn't an obvious big win over
chalkboards. One advantage of the chalkboard is that it is very flexible: you
can gesture at it, redo it on demand, or scrawl circles and arrows all over
it. Another advantage is that it is typically _huge_ , offering you lots of
opportunity to, say, write Maxwell's equations in a box to the left and leave
them up through the whole lecture for reference. Finally, chalkboard
derivations go up slowly (sometimes _really_ slowly, if the writer is not well
practiced), which can be bad, but which also makes it easy for the professor
to interject meaningful comments.

But I think the availability of digital video playback, cheap cameras, and
nonlinear editing changes this problem a lot.

~~~
ph0rque
I am the type of person who prefers written text to video... I can envision
the following:

1\. Scene-setting --> introductory paragraph

2\. Proposing a problem --> video/animation of the problem at hand

3\. Derivation --> written and recorded in something like EtherPad, so one can
see not only the result, but the process of writing it.

4\. Summary --> summary paragraph

5\. Questions --> nested comments a la HN/reddit/etc. As a bonus, add the
ability to highlight and right-click on any part of the text, and add a
comment there.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I also prefer written text to video. But I'm prepared to admit that there are
certain things that come through better on video, that there are quite a few
learners who learn better via video, and that great lectures have a wonderful
charm that complements written material nicely.

Feynman's transcribed lectures are great, but videos of Feynman's live
delivery are _extra_ great. The Long Island accent alone is worth the price of
admission. Feynman sounds like a human being, a guy who lives down the street,
not like some disembodied Platonic ideal of genius.

I've also been in quite a few classes where the textbook was simply useless
but the lecturer saved the day. [1] (And the opposite, as well.)

And your ideas all sound great. Obviously there will be lots of room for
experimentation. It's going to take many years to fully explore our new
genres.

\---

[1] I would pay cash money for a video of Neil Ashcroft's graduate stat mech
lectures. Or Roald Hoffmann on the band structure of solids -- although _his_
textbook, written by him, isn't bad either; they complement each other
perfectly, by design.

~~~
ph0rque
> I'm prepared to admit that there are certain things that come through better
> on video, that there are quite a few learners who learn better via video,
> and that great lectures have a wonderful charm that complements written
> material nicely.

Same here... there's no reason one can't have both for each of the 5 points
(both text and video)

