Help:Lectures
From Studyplace
On StudyPlace, let us treat subjects in a lecture format. A lecture is a text, to be read or heard, giving a clear, economical exposition of common knowledge about an explicit topic. A lecture is not unlike an encyclopedia article, except that it is generally crafted with greater attention to its educative effectiveness in conveying its contents in a memorable, easily apprehended way. A good lecture holds the attention of its audience. It does not confuse. It anticipates questions, provokes thought, and leads auditors to further inquiry. It should treat its subject, covering the parts, in a unified performance that can be heard or read in a single sitting lasting approximately an hour, plus or minus. To deal with large, complicated subjects, a series of lectures is required, as the scale of the individual lecture must remain relatively fixed. Lectures and lecture series can vary in sophistication according to the amount and depth of prior knowledge those composing the lectures assume as attributes of readers and listeners. Whether introductory, intermediate, or advanced, a lecture, or lecture series, needs to treat its topic as a unity, clearly composed of parts, conveying the essentials of each in a style that makes those essentials easy to remember and easy to understand. We believe that such lectures will lend themselves to peer production.
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Deciding to work on an explanation or lecture
On StudyPlace, participants can engage in a variety of different modes of peer production: conversing, explaining, informing, or presenting in a variety of forms — reporting, essaying, reviewing, or documenting. All are related yet each has a distinctive character. What do you want to work on? What mode of presentation is most appropriate for the topic that is on your mind? In the larger scheme of things where does it fit in? Who will be interested in it and why? What questions give it importance? What would you like to see achieved through it? What resources are significant in preparing to address it? Your tacit and explicit answers to questions such as these will dispose you to address a topic of interest to you through one or another mode of peer production on StudyPlace.
This decision need not be final, and it will often proceed through a process of narrowing the choice down, frequently to a choice between explaining and informing. In StudyPlace, we connect the former to the tradition of lecture writing, not so much in the pattern of preparing a lecture for an academic course, but in the tradition of lectures for a general public and in the American Lyceum[1] or Chautauqua Movement.[2] Many of Emerson's great essays grew out of lectures he developed through numerous iterations, engaged with diverse audiences.[3] We equate explaining with lecturing, which aims to illuminate a broad topic, and contrast this with informing, which links to the encyclopedic article conveying essential knowledge about a specific topic. Were these lenses, as the current cliché often puts it, at their best, explaining sees through a wide-angle lens and informing through a telephoto. We deal here with efforts to explain, through the wide-angel lens, what scholars know about what educates.
Choosing the topic to explain through a lecture
Informing starts with a particular topic defined by any one of a myriad of keywords. Explaining starts with the field of knowledge as a whole and tries to orient auditors who share an interest in a narrower subject, yet one of some generality, so that they clearly understand the relation of that subject to the larger whole. What are the parts and why, in the larger scheme of things, are they significant? This is the basic question animating explanation for speaker and auditor alike. In explaining a matter, the speaker makes some assumptions about the state of knowledge possessed by auditors in both directions: what do they know of the parts and of the larger scheme of things? With little assumed the strategy of a good lecture will be introductory; with a moderate amount the lecture becomes intermediate, at once more concrete and more comprehensive; with much in common between speaker and listener, lectures become advanced with diverse particulars dealt with in the light of the whole. StudyPlace has room for explanations reflecting the gamut of these strategies, but it is important to be clear, in working on this or that, at what level the explanation is to be pitched.
What can we cover? The full range of knowledge about education,broken into its major subject components, with all of that susceptible to introductory, intermediate, and advanced treatment. That encompasses many possibilities; each participant has the choice of which, if any, to work on in particular.
Preparing work on the topic
Starting the lecture
To start a lecture, create a page and put the following at the top of it — {{Explaining}}. This will place a marker in the upper right corner indicating that it is part of the effort on StudyPlace at explaining the common stock of knowledge about education.
Contributing to a Lecture
Editing a Lecture
References
- ↑ Carl Bode. The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1956, 1968)
- ↑ Andrew C. Rieser. The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
- ↑ For an excellent study of Emerson's thought as he developed it through his essays and public lectures, see Lawrence Buell. Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Except where