Zeugma

Why read research on education?

Was writing a review of two legal educational texts (more about that in a later post) when a paragraph where I mentioned in passing the value of research sort of got hijacked and blocked by the topic, so thought I'd put down thoughts here to vent on it.  Why read research on education? 

video

U. of California at Berkeley has been posting teaching videos on YouTube -- see here or here.  Good idea, but am I the only one to wonder why they’re videotaping actual lectures?  This doesn’t play to the new medium at all, unless it’s got pretty high production values, and a very engaging speaker, and even then….  The live lecture is a totally different social, cultural, informational environment from watching video.  And then to have a video of a lecturer writing with chalk on a blackboard, talking the while to the blackboard – one actually writing up the course requirements on said blackboard  while r-e-a-d-i-n-g it all out loud – not quite the dual channel use of multimedia we have in mind when we think of video/audio streams…

Can anyone explain this one?  Am I missing something?

3D rhetoric

My first encounter with hypertext was Guide Hypertext, courtesy of Des O'Brian, my erstwhile tutor at GU Eng Lit Dept, and director of the STELLA lab, now part of HATTI, I believe.  That was back in 1989.  Having seen his experiments with Passus XX of Piers Plowman, I was hooked.  I spent over 16 hours a day putting together programs that would help students write essays.  It was to that, and too much strong coffee, that I attribute the waking hallucinations that I had -- I was walking through an enchanted medieval garden, and all around me hung bits of text from trees.  I could reach up and touch them.  Oddly, I had the sense of a coherent form, even though the texts were in fragments around me.

That waking dream is becoming a reality.

Transforming Legal Education

My book, Transforming Legal Education, was published on Friday – website accompanying it is here.  Apart from advertising the book the site contains a wiki that will be the launchpad for another, much more ambitious and adventurous publication, called the Transforming Initiative.