Why Have Lec­tures?

by Elio

Re­cently, I wrote an ar­ti­cle called In De­fense of the Lec­ture (PDF) It ap­peared in Res­o­nance, a sci­ence ed­u­ca­tion jour­nal of the In­dian Acad­emy of Sci­ences. If you care to know what this is about, here is the first para­graph from the ar­ti­cle:

"When it comes to teach­ing, every­one is an ex­pert, so why not me? Any amount of ex­pe­ri­ence, large or small, guar­an­tees that one will hold strong views. I am no ex­cep­tion. In the course of over 50 years, per­haps 20,000 stu­dents have had to lis­ten to me, the ma­jor­ity of whom I prob­a­bly bored, a few whom I may have stim­u­lated. I have no for­mal train­ing in ped­a­gogy. With these du­bi­ous creden­tials, let me make a sin­gle point: Lec­tures are a vi­tal as­pect of uni­ver­sity teach­ing."

Come­nius, Or­bis sen­su­al­ium pic­tus. Source