As promised, quick reflections on the lectures in my Astrobiology course (introduced in my first post, “Where no man has gone before”).
The lecturer, a University of Edinburgh professor of Astrobiology (obviously) was casually dressed although after four weeks I thought he might want to wear a different shirt. (The fifth week he wore a sweater over it.) He mostly addressed the camera, with a little netbook in hand he occasionally glanced at and swiped. He was easy to understand, and perfectly likable. (He enjoyed quite a fan base according to the discussion posts but I’ll save that for another blog entry.)
The presentation was completely basic and predictable, which has both good and bad sides. The good news was you always knew where you were, the lectures were segmented into brief pieces, and there was always a summing up at the end. The bad news was that it was like the old advice for writing a paper: tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell’ em what you told ’em.
There were two lecture topics a week (it was a condensed five-week course). Each topic was broken down into about three pieces which varied in length from seven to twenty or so minutes. Each segment began with him telling us the three or four topics we were going to cover (“early attempts to understand the workings of the universe”), then a discussion of those topics (“Copernicus believed… Galileo concluded…”) and finally a conclusion always presented by the lecturer in the same way: “So what have we learned?” (“– that there have been many attempts to understand the workings of the universe”). In other words, clear, basic, repetitive. I was interested in the subject matter, so that was ok, but it was frustratingly general.
So, for example, we learned the concept of habitable zones, or where life is likely to exist, but then looked at possible sources of life well outside those zones (a moon of Jupiter, etc) without explanation (more on this when I get to a discussion of the discussion forum.) We looked at amino acids but only in the most basic way, with little explanation for what they did or how they worked. It was very helpful as an introduction to the basic ideas behind astrobiology but provided less substance than a Wikipedia article. It was more like an astrobio tease, I guess. A fun tease if you are into that sort of thing (which I am) but I think I learned more physics and biology from Star Trek. Although they do have the universal translator to help with the aliens they encounter.
He did use graphics, but far less than he might have. So when he mentioned biodiversity we would see a picture of a penguin and a giraffe, or something like that, and when he mentioned the moons of Jupiter we saw a snapshot of them. And certainly he put up a few graphs and charts when discussing specific topics. But he could have done so much more, not only to illustrate his points but perhaps to extend them or provide greater depth. So, for example, rather than showing a schematic of the earth’s layers (which is helpful) he could also have shown pictures of what each layer looks like, lava flowing, pictures of the Marianus (however you spell it) trench, etc. When he discussed movement and mobility he put up a picture of two girls dancing.
And sometimes he stood right in front of the image which didn’t help much.
But it was helpful that the lecture was on line in the sense that you could pause it on the chart and try to get more information from it than he was offering, which you couldn’t do in a classroom. On the other hand, you couldn’t ask him to move.
Nor, of course, could you ask questions, which is still one of my two strongest objections to on-line lectures. (The other objection is similar — when you lecture to a class, you can see where they don’t get something and can slow down, rephrase, or whatever. My lectures are always different since my classes are always different. This is one size fits all, which often misses the specific needs of specific groups. The downside of “massive” OOCs.)
In short, the lectures were perfectly interesting and informative, but too superficial and repetitive for my taste, and did not make as much use of images and media as one easily could in this sort of venue. And watching it at home on screen, I confess it was rather harder to resist doing other things at the same time than it would have been had I been in the same room as him. It was nice to be able to stop and replay bits I missed as I zoned out, but I do think I would have zoned out less often had he been physically there.
And I did love the accent.