Silly Little Country

Big Ideas and the Best Lecturer

'Big Ideas', referred to in an earlier post, is a series on TV Ontario, that uses a couple of hours each weekend day, to expose its viewers, or its willing ones, to lectures on a variety of topics. Over the last year or so I have enjoyed Charles Krauthammer, and suffered Terry Eagleton, for example, and seen Alan Dershowitz deal like a gentleman (i.e. try to debate) with ruffians from the University of Toronto.
It would appear that over the last year couple of years they are having difficulty finding cheap lectures (unencumbered with IP concerns?) locally, so they have started to fill the show with what they call the "Ontario's Best Lecturer" competition.
The top ten began their showdown last weekend, as Jacalyn Duffin gave an entertaining travelogue of Paris and other parts of France mingled with the medical career of Lannaeck and its implications, reaching to today, and Steve Joordens analyzed whether we should allow animal experimentation for research purposes. I learned a lot from both presentations and felt delighted to be able to watch them.
I think the show is a great idea but it certainly does not measure a lecturer's skills. The format that is used for judging the skills is important and limited - watching both lectures, I found it hard to believe that a 45-minute monologue was what they do in class (and actually the background materials on both showed that they decidedly do NOT do monologues in class). So what is the point - "Ontario's best monologuer" does not sound so good as "Ontario's best lecturer".
I lectured, and I think quite well, for ten years in another career, and the idea of going 2 minutes without trying to engage an audience direct response is alien to me. I am sure that is true of all these lecturers as well. I do not know how the format can be fixed, though; an audience with TV cameras will not respond like one in a classroom, and so the game is over from square one.
Still, this is yet another fine idea from TV Ontario, another that eludes the CBC.

P.S. You can go to my web page link above and see the lecturers in action. This is one of the great joys of the Internet!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:46 PM