Researchers in Bournemouth University, in England, have literalized a retronym: They’ve created real snail mail.
In a project that combines technical prowess with art and whimsy, the researchers have designed a system for delivering messages by using actual snails. An e-mail is sent to a tank containing snails fitted with RFID chips. If and when a snail wanders by the e-mail collection site, its RFID chip will pick up the message. Then, if and when that snail wanders by the drop-off point in another area of the tank, the e-mail will be delivered (at that point, via the Internet, of course).
RealSnailMail’s creators apparently intended to comment on the role that speed and efficiency play in modern lives.
“Culturally, we seem obsessed with immediacy. Time is not to be taken but crammed to bursting point,” Paul Smith, an artist and RealSnailMail co-creator, told the BBC.
The project will officially launch in August at a conference in Los Angeles. In the mean time, the researchers are testing out their mailmen. According to the RealSnailMail Web site, three snails have managed to deliver 16 e-mails—but Agent 003 (Muriel) hasn’t exactly been pulling her weight. Her deliveries so far? 0. But hey, maybe she just has an aggressive spam filter.—Catherine Rampell
20 Responses to Real Snail Mail
strategist_3 - February 14, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Excellent advice, and as someone who gives a lot of lectures, I will now try to keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the lecture format.
joud3084 - February 14, 2012 at 7:03 pm
I appreciate this post, in part because it tries to nuance the idea that any lecturing at all is old school “sage on the stage.” But I cannot help noticing that these are quite modest defenses of lecturing, where the lecture is at best a second- or third-tier practice that never accomplishes the main work of learning. I disagree with so limited a defense of lecturing, even while agreeing that it is a poor way to convey information and too often doesn’t cognitively engage listeners.
Many of the intellectual traditions into which we want to bring our students are best apprehended as ongoing conversations or debates, rigorously structured arguments where some reasonable interpretations prevail for a time and then are nuanced or rejected or radically modified. A good lecturer can bring these intellectual traditions alive in ways that energize student thinking, and in ways unlikely to be achieved by working through problem sets or making nice handouts or referring to chapter 3 which students can read on their own time. And such lectures, when well organized and interestingly presented, are a vastly more efficient way to lay this foundation so that today’s debates — the possibilities they pursue as well as the dead ends they risk — will make sense than to have students look it up themselves and lecture each other in models centered on the journal or oral report. To discount this important intellectual work as mere “story telling” or “modeling” the life of the mind underplays its value.
I suspect the reason so many faculty persist in lecturing has less to do with their clinging to ancient hand-me-down lecture notes or their resistance to the new neuroscientific findings on learning behavior, and more to do with their desire to reproduce the engaging lecture that in their own education first brought them into contact with a knowledge tradition and set of rich conversations they were at-that-moment exhilaratingly lured into joining.
ipinalynne - February 14, 2012 at 7:05 pm
I love the analogy to TED and sermons. I too get carried away and afterwards have only bits and pieces of the message, enough to say “it was about _____” or a enough to have a remembrance of some surprising insight or fact.
gavin_moodie - February 15, 2012 at 12:35 am
I suggest that lectures are also good for pacing students thru their study, effectively telling them that they should be up to x by now, and that one expects to finish y by the break.
arrive2__net - February 15, 2012 at 5:47 pm
I think it’s a great article. Another thing that lectures can be good for is presenting new material, that is, new developments or research for which interactive media has not yet been developed. It seems to me that it’s also good in general for material that subject to rapid obsolescence, as the lecture is fairly easy to refresh or update.
I think inspiration can be a very important aspect of the lecture because it is often necessary to motivate learners to want to learn the material, and that is what inspiration in teaching can do. Of course if its “in one ear and out the other” type inspiration that inspires no follow-up action or thinking, as the article implies, it will not have a lasting effect.
Lectures may be better at persuasion in some contexts in my opinion, where students may be predisposed to disagree with the material. Also live lectures can be adjusted somewhat in terms of breaks, length, and content based on observed audience feedback.
In smaller classes, especially where there is some classroom interaction between lecturer and students, a lecture may also give the students a sense that the learning is important. The lecturer is focusing attention on teaching them…that may also give an added motivation to some students to learn. It seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between small classroom lectures and big lecture hall lectures, because the small class lectures tend to be much more interactive. Big lecture hall lectures are often close to videotaped lectures in interactivity.
Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com/All.htm
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
sgtoners - February 16, 2012 at 4:21 am
nice idea, I do not hate a lecture if I am interested in the subject . Anyway, I like the lecture who can tell me a lot of funny story. This sory can bring me a lof ot useful industry information.
sgtoners - February 16, 2012 at 4:46 am
In asian countries, the class is really very boring . The teachers are speaking , the students are sleeping. I think the lesson will be more interesting if we can have more lectures
Robert Talbert - February 16, 2012 at 7:45 am
Good comment. I’m afraid that this is about as vigorous a defense of lecture as I can muster. I personally did not learn my subject (mathematics) through a series of engaging lectures — in fact I cannot remember a single lecture in my entire education that really stands out — but rather as an engagement itself, hand-to-hand, with the mathematics I was learning. Getting my hands dirty and finding something beautiful in the mess, rather than having someone invite me into a great conversation. I have a feeling that most mathematicians are this way (I could be wrong).
Gregory_Sadler - February 16, 2012 at 10:37 am
I have to agree with joud3084 that: “Many of the intellectual traditions into which we want to bring our
students are best apprehended as ongoing conversations or debates,
rigorously structured arguments where some reasonable interpretations
prevail for a time and then are nuanced or rejected or radically
modified. A good lecturer can bring these intellectual traditions alive
in ways that energize student thinking. . . ”
One of the great failures, in my view, of contemporary education theory, which does tend to disparage lecture as “chalk and talk,” is that it fails to take sufficient stock of two interconnected matters.
First, pedagogical strategies and techniques which work well in one discipline may not work well in another — and ed theorists who don’t know those disciplines are rather unqualified to determine what will work well in a discipline in which they haven’t been rigorously trained. It’s the successful practitioners in those disciplines who ought to determine whether, e.g. lectures are still a good way to teach in that discipline.
Second, it seems as if ed theorists often reinvent old wheels, discovering and repackaging insights already to some degree embodied, and sometimes explicitly discussed in the literature of the older disciplines. There are ways to use lectures well — and those have been around and practiced long before the relatively recent shift in perspective on the effectiveness or suitability of lectures.
In my own discipline of Philosophy, I find that — whatever “new” pedagogical” techniques or strategies I incorporate (and I have studied and incorporated a few in my time) — students want lectures, precisely because the material is inherently difficult, and involves strategies of attentive reading and reflection with which they are generally unfamiliar. They need — and thrive when given — those four purposes discussed in Talbert’s article. They also do need — and express gratitude for — information transfer. Sometimes, it takes hearing a prof talk about it, put some things on the board, taking notes, engaging in discussion — for matters in Philosophy to start to “click”.
Should this be a big surprise? Perhaps not so much. It’s not as if ancient and medieval philosophers just relied upon rote learning, memorization, and deadly dry lectures — they were members within and contributors to those “intellectual traditions into which we want to bring our
students”
Gregory_Sadler - February 16, 2012 at 10:56 am
It’s funny. I started videoing my course lectures for Critical Thinking classes two semesters ago, and continued the process with Intro to Philosophy and Ethics last semester and this semester. I do a lot of lecture — chalk and talk — with some discussion, questions to the students from time to time, some reflection on group work but a LOT of exposition. According to the experts, the lectures, and the videos ought to be rather poor vehicles for learning.
My lectures are uploaded into my Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler . I make them available to my own students in our CMS, but also to anyone else who wants to watch them. On average, I get 2-3 students — not students in my classes, but elsewhere — or other adult learners per week writing me to express their thanks for posting the videos, telling me that they enjoy them, that they’re learning from them — even requesting me to produce other videos. My own students have also expressed similar views.
Here’s what I find particularly interesting, in relation to this blog post. The education experts focused on distance or online ed say videos should be only 5-10 minutes tops. Mine range from 40 minutes to over an hour. Students and other people watch them all the way through — and complain on the few occasions where they ended abruptly because my flip cam ran out of battery power. As I mentioned above, I do quite a bit of exposition — information transfer. That should also be the kiss of death according to the experts, right? So, why are students getting something out of these — and actually taking the time to write and say that they are?
Maybe the experts are right about some aspects but wrong about others when it comes to the value of lectures
Robert Talbert - February 16, 2012 at 3:02 pm
“So, why are students getting something out of these — and actually taking the time to write and say that they are?”
It’s more accurate to say SOME students are getting something out of these. The students who do not get anything out of them are unlikely to speak up on YouTube and say so. I’d be keenly interested, if it were my lectures, in the ratio of the former to the latter.
Also, since (as we all know) people tend to comment in the moment, it would be worthwhile to know what percentage of the content is retained and recalled correctly at times that are relatively far away from the time of viewing. And in mathematics, I’d want to know if the viewers are able to apply what they have learned to a new contextual problem. If they can’t, then the lecture wasn’t enough to help my students meet their learning objectives.
In other words, a positive comment on a YouTube video is great — my YouTube videos have plenty of those — but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the lectures represent effective pedagogy. They might and they might not.
Gregory_Sadler - February 16, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Fair enough. I’m not sure where I suggested that most or all of the viewers are finding the lectures engaging and getting something out of them which they’re not getting elsewhere, the point on which you believe I need some clarification or correction. I understand that the best I can provide is anecdotal information. Often, that’s what we’ve got to work with.
I do suspect that these students who make the positive comments represent more than just themselves. What proportion, sure, admittedly, I don’t know.
I’m not sure how one would actually obtain data bearing on students who don’t get anything out of the Youtube vids — I generally learn that a person self-identifies as a student precisely because they do so explicitly in a comment or a message. Perhaps there’s some more sophisticated analytic out there which could capture that.
coyabean - February 16, 2012 at 8:18 pm
And I think that is common to all arguments on this topic: everyone is privileging their own learning style and learning biographies.
I, for instance, learn best from lectures particularly those that allow me to speak back to the material. I am an aural learner with strong verbal acuity. If you ask me to do more than one group project or move my desk to break into anything resembling an artsty-fartsy hands-on component I break out into mental hives. I want to sit still, engage with words, hear someone else narrate the idea, narrate back what I think I heard, sit silently some more as I reconstruct the words into new ideas, and talk back some more. What happens to a student like me in the non-lecture environment is exactly what happens to the spatial learner in my lecture environment: someone gets screwed.
The challenge, then, isn’t to abolish lecturing but for all who teach to remember that their own learning style is not every learning style and to try and accommodate as many as possible while simultaneously accepting the limits of our doing so. It’s not a perfect science but neither is learning.
David Jones - February 16, 2012 at 9:24 pm
I do wonder whether or not the four things you identify (which I think are useful) are only of value for a lecture. They strike me as things that can be beneficial in other teaching/learning modes
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 9:21 am
That’s absolutely the case that what I mentioned are simply good pedagogical tactics, regardless of instructional mode. But lecture seems particularly well-suited for these.
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 9:23 am
Well, you simply monitor their progress on tasks that are rooted in what they got out of the videos. In my inverted programming class, students took a quiz and did online homework tasks after watching the videos. (The quiz was done in-class.) If they perform well, it means they got something out of the videos, whether or not they enjoyed the experience. If they didn’t, it means they didn’t get what the needed out of the videos, even if they left a positive comment on YouTube.
As for people who watch our videos who we cannot assess — like the people who are watching my MATLAB videos now, who are not enrolled in the course — it’s probably impossible to say what they may or may not be getting.
Gregory_Sadler - February 18, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Yes, I already have been assessing students for years in my classes with a variety of means, some directly connected to the vids. I get how assessment works, and how it would be used for my own students watching lecture videos.
I think you must have misread my comments. It’s not my ftf students who leave comments on my YouTube lecture videos, nor are my ftf students anything more than a sliver of the viewership. The positive comments are coming, like I wrote, from students who are enrolled elsewhere. And, right — no way to effectively get data on them, at least not now.
arrive2__net - February 22, 2012 at 4:14 am
I think lectures can be highly effective, and of course the article indicates some of the lecture’s best uses. However, it’s certainly true that all lectures are not created equal … some are stimulating … some put you to sleep. In large lecture halls, requiring students to attend every lecture can backfire because the truly disinterested students show up and snooze, creating a huge and annoying distraction. In large lecture halls, sleeping in class sometimes seems to catch on, so if one student gets away with it, others join in, to the point where it can become difficult to hear the professor above the snoring.
An interesting lecture is one factor that can keep students attentive, another factor is the importance of the lecture to the students’ grades.
It is an advantage of online learning that the students are able to choose to do their work at a time when they are not sleepy. Usually, in online learning, the students’ grades are totally dependent on interaction and performance on assignments, and seat time itself is less of a factor.
Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com/All.htm
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
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