Fortnightly Mailing

Sugata Mitra - "The hole in the wall": self organising systems in education

Here is the video recording of Sugata Mitra's 8 September keynote speech at the 2010 ALT Conference in Nottingham.

Donald Clark's "Don't Lecture Me" keynote at ALT-C 2010

Disclosure - I work for ALT half time. Post updated 30/9/2010.

Donald Clark spoke at ALT-C 2010 on 7 September 2010: topic "Don't Lecture Me". The talk was a structured, passionate,  critique of the lecture as an ineffective way to support learning. Donald's talk was controversial, and he chose not to hide his anger at what he sees as the wasting of public resources (physical and human) that lectures involve. (Abstract of talk, with two comments on the talk itself.)

Some in the audience were unhappy with the talk; but I think it got the conference off to a good and challenged start. You can make up your own mind.

Twitter has become a major cog in the machinery of conferences where a substantial proportion of participants are enthusiastic users of social media, and have an "always on" device with them and running during talks. Consequently the #altc2010 "back channel" was buzzing. As well as ~500 delegates in the auditorium, around 60 participants were accessing Donald's talk in real time, free, using Elluminate. Alongside this, unknown additional numbers were following the talk second hand (and commenting on it?) through the back channel, in effect mildly heckling him,  albeit with neither Donald nor the non-tweeting audience realising it at the time. Donald picked up on it some days later, and here is his response, plus plenty of comments, including mine.  

I've got mixed views about the way that Twitter works in these situations. I'm incapable of following a line of argument whilst i) trying to write pithy observations on it, and ii) keeping an eye on what other people using Twitter are writing. Does this kind of research evidence ["Cognitive control in media multitaskers" - HTML] and this kind ["The effect of multitasking on the grade performance of business students" - PDF] show that those who think they can multi-task are, like phone-using drivers, deluding themselves? My experience at this year's ALT conference has been that the value of the back-channel has varied widely: sometimes it seems to work like a bad feedback loop on a sound system (for an angle on this, see Jaron Lanier's interview in the Guardian); sometimes it seems to add focus and clarity to a discussion, and to induce productive involvement. In the case of Donald's keynote it seems to have worked in both ways.