Listening And The Lecture

04-02-2017

Listening And The Lecture

[caption id="attachment_18821" align="alignleft" width="300"] (photo by Karl Rabe)[/caption] Miya Tokumitsu offers a defense of the much maligned university lecture. The attack on the lecture—that is passive learning and offers one-size-fits-all education—should not be true. A good lecturer engages her students. In any well-performed lecture, there is a give and take between professor and student. And students are active, taking notes, thinking, and asking questions. Most important, Tokumitsu argues, learning by lectures teaches students to listen, an art that is as necessary as it is endangered today.

"Neoliberalism has also made it hard to recognize the work students perform in lectures. Many critics dismiss lecture attendance as "passive learning," arguing that students in lectures do not do anything. Today, declaring something passive completely delegitimizes it. The sociologist Eve Chiapello and the linguist Norman Fairclough argue that in today’s management culture, activity for its own sake has become essential to personal success: "What is relevant is to be always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project." Indeed, in our constant scramble to project adaptable employability, we must always seem harried, even if our flailing about isn’t directed toward anything concrete. Without moving around or speaking, lecture attendees certainly don’t look busy, and so their activity is assumed to be passive, unproductive, and, consequently, irrelevant. But lecture attendees do lots of things: They take notes, they react, they scan the room for reactions, and most importantly, they listen. Listening to a sustained, hourlong argument requires initiative, will, and focus. In other words, it is an activity. But today, the act of listening counts for very little, as it does not appear to produce any outcomes or have an evident goal. No matter how fast-paced the world becomes, listening will remain essential to public dialogue and debate. As Monessa Cummins, department chair of classics at Grinnell College, explained to The New York Times: Can students "listen to a political candidate with an analytical ear? Can they go and listen to their minister with an analytical ear? Can they listen to one another? One of the things a lecture does is build that habit.""

Form more information visit: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Long-Live-the-Lecture-/239555

The Liberal University in Illiberal Times

I have lectured twice at the Central European University in Budapest. It is a remarkable institution that stands firmly for an open society and the beauty and meaning of intellectual freedom. And for the past seven years it has been a target of Viktor Orbán, Hungary's President who argues in favor of what he calls "illiberal democracy." Now Orbán and his government have proposed a law that is aimed directly at forcing the Central European University out of Hungary. CEU is a fully independent university with its own board and independent priorities. But in the world of Eastern Europe today, being associated with a Jewish patron who advocates for openness and liberal democracy is a sin. It is imperative that the world stand up and let Hungary know that such a blatant act of illiberal discrimination is unacceptable. Daniel Penev is a Masters student at CEU and a journalist. He writes both about what is happening in Hungary and the reasons it is important to save the Central European University.

"In line with the values and principles of open society, CEU has since its establishment brought to Budapest prominent thinkers and scholars to discuss the most pertinent topics of the day and further inspire students and faculty. Whether it is a guest lecture, a discussion panel, a conference, or a workshop, it doesn’t matter much. What matters, instead, is the fact that CEU hosts multiple and diverse events virtually every day throughout the entire academic year. If I confine myself to the guest lectures of interest to me only during the winter semester (9 January – 31 March), I can, with great delight, say that I had the chance to listen to internationally renowned speakers, politicians, and diplomats like Timothy Garton Ash (professor of European studies at Oxford University), Mark Lilla (professor of humanities at Columbia University), Jan-Werner Müller (professor of politics at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna), Ivan Krastev (chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna), Jacques Rupnik (professor at Sciences Po), Morgan Johansson (Minister for Justice and Migration of Sweden), and Liubov Nepop (Ambassador of Ukraine to Hungary). Events of this kind not only benefit CEU students and faculty but contribute to the academic vibe of Budapest and Hungary as a whole. Budapest has been CEU’s home for more than two decades. In return, CEU has made Budapest a more visible and attractive spot on the academic and cultural map of Europe. CEU and Budapest need each other."

Form more information visit: https://www.lawfareblog.com/revolt-judges-what-happens-when-judiciary-doesnt-trust-presidents-oath

Portable Radio

[caption id="attachment_18824" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Casey Fiesler from Atlanta - Serial Podcast, CC BY 2.0[/caption] Michelle Dean wonders: whither the podcast?

"We are living through a great flowering of the podcast industry, whose province of iTunes is something like a frontier boomtown right now, teeming with hastily erected new storefronts. The podcast form has been around since about 2004—it is kissing cousins with the iPod, in that way—but it was only in 2014 that the idea struck gold. That would be the Serial moment, when Sarah Koenig’s twelve-episode exploration of a long-forgotten murder in Baltimore morphed into an amateur crime-solving hobby for millions of bored listeners. Before that, podcasts were a thing audio nerds did and talked about. Now, in the comfortable, educated, middle-class households of America, podcasts slot pleasantly into the routine of daily life. They help pass the time commuting on a crowded train or cleaning the bathroom. The experience lies somewhere between binge-listening and background noise. Even though podcasts share no particular style and very few conventions, a sense of high purpose lingers around them. Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it’s a history lecture broadcast from a university, or an amateur talk show recorded in someone’s garage. Both types of show are somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar subjects and subcultures. But the essence of a podcast is to be esoteric, specialized. And sometimes it’s hard to draw a line between the specific and the trivial."

Form more information visit: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/16/the-making-of-islamophobia-inc/