IN WHAT looks like a student lecture hall in the concrete bowels of Guatemala's Supreme Court building, lawyers confront each other behind flimsy trestle tables.
Through a friend who ran the student lecture series at the SUNY campus, I had the chance to have a beer and wings with Jimmy Breslin.
In part, we are listening to a student lecture by a young woman, Louise, about a fictive conceptual artist, Janet Adler, her relationship with her partner, Margaret Gibb, and her mysterious death.
At the bookstore at City College of New York, the ninth edition of "Chemistry, the Central Science" comes in a $139.25 bundle with no fewer than five supplements: a "math review toolkit," a CD-ROM, a student lecture notebook and booklet of solutions to a set of exercises, and a "peer-led team learning" book.
For the student, lecture form teaching can lead to overload and fragmentation (Benner et al. [2010]) and does not contribute to the deep understanding required for true learning (Ramsden [2003]), as new knowledge needs to be processed, analysed and practiced to have a lasting effect.
Example of a funded project in materials development: 1122616, Graham Walker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Producing StarCellBio, a set of in silico simulations of cell biology experiments for use in generating realistic problems for undergraduate student lecture and laboratory classes (http://star.mit.edu/index.html ).html
As a Princeton faculty member, he echoed the philosophy of James McCosh, a former president of the school (then the College of New Jersey), in his public and student lectures on a "scientific approach to Christianity".
In the summer of 1994, I had the pleasure of spending 2 months at CERN, attending student lectures in the morning and working with an experimental group for the rest of the time.
The study was advertised at core student lectures, on the virtual learning environment and by emailed invitations to all students.
Having heard enough, I stood up to address the 300-student lecture, "Whiteness organizes for the benefits of Whiteness" I said.
Adaptive and personalized learning enables students to learn much better than a thousand-student lecture hall could ever allow -- and with the possibility of early graduation, and less debt, to boot.
