Techno-silly

Twain: Non sucky lecture.

Rick Hess's blog was taken over by a guest (Meira Levinson, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) who opined:

As a professor, I am a techno-enthusiast: I'm constantly asking my students to do in-class activities using GoogleDocs or wikis, and I've moved all my lectures on-line on the grounds that it's criminal in 2011 to force a bunch of people to show up in the same room just to hear one person monodirectionally deliver information.

Criminal? Interesting choice of words. Why should it be such an imposition for the students to show up to one place at a scheduled time? The reason they are (usually) required to be there is that lectures are rarely one-directional, unless the lecturer sucks. If I lecture, I am always looking for some kind of feedback if for no other reason than to ascertain whether any of them are awake.

I guess if you're that boring or if you're just reading from, and never veer away from, a script then an attendance requirement should be waived, but that doesn't seem like much of a college to me. It's curious that the college manages to convince people that this online, easy-access, don't care if you do or not, video repeated for the third straight year is worth the tuition:

Full-time Students	Per Academic Year	$35,568.00
Part-time Students	Per Course/Per Term	$ 4,446.00

If it doesn't matter whether or not the students are there, you might as well be running a video. Go ahead and put it online.