It’s not to hear me lecture; I could flip that. It’s not to watch a video; they can do that on their own, elsewhere. It’s not to engage in sustained silent reading; that too can be done by students at anytime, anywhere. It’s not for students to take a reading quiz; they can do that via our LMS, Canvas, and be anywhere.
It is so that we can engage in dialogue[1].
With three colleagues, I attended a small- to medium-sized national conference this week, with 300–500 attendees, and I was struck by the seeming failure of attendees and organizers to ask the same fundamental question as blended-learning: why are we all together in the same place at the same time?
I was shocked to have presenters literally read an academic paper to those attending the session[2].
What a wasted opportunity each of these “paper sessions” was! The paper could easily have been published and distributed to conference attendees to read on their own — with the added benefit of being able to annotate and return to the document. The session time could then have been spent elaborating on the antecedent research questions, research methodologies pursued and discarded, correlates noticed but not written about in the paper, or any number of other details around the research.
If any one of our students read an essay at a class as their oral presentation, as these academics did, we – every educator in attendance – would fail the student. And yet it was done to us by these very same educators!
I find the instructional methodology of so-called Higher Ed, as evidence by these paper sessions, to be a disservice to all. The point of a national academic conference should be rich conversation.