SEEKING ALTERNATIVES TO CHALK AND TALK. University Diaries points to Hugo at Cliopatria who points to Scott Inside Higher Ed all contemplating the evolution of the lecture into entertainment.

I will quote from Hugo at length.

One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them manifest in their words and in their movements. Teach them the forgotten art of the genuinely engaging lecture. Twelve years of college teaching (and over 120 classes taught in that time), as well as thousands of student evaluations, have made it clear to me that students really prefer a professor who is willing to bring his passion and energy into the classroom.

This is not to say that good teachers can't be both great lecturers and skilled employers of the latest technology. I have a few colleagues -- a very few -- whom I know to be both. But I do know that the college culture is one where innovation and novelty tend to be prized more than the ability to teach effectively using the same methods used for centuries. No one writes grants to get money to teach professors how to tell good stories using their memories and their voices alone. I think that's a pity. I, as the son and grandson of teachers, delight in knowing that I use little or nothing that those who came before me would not have used. I take inordinate, perhaps excessive, pride in that.

I expect to spend another 25 years teaching, perhaps more. I am always interested in developing new classes and discussing new ideas. But I have yet to see the need to show many videos, or to have a smart classroom, or to put up Power Point whatevers for my students. Don't wire my classroom. Give me a cup of coffee, put chalk in my hand, put me in front of a blackboard, and let me do my damn job.

Technology faddists, note: Power Point is not an "active learning" alternative to lecturing. If anything, Power Point, and the even more unproductive use of technology called the video, provide even less of an opportunity for give-and-take than the lecture. The largest of lecture halls provides opportunity for the lecturer to maintain eye contact, to look for visual cues that people are not following the presentation (it is bad form to bring a stock of tennis balls to catch the attention of the catnapper in the back row), and to encourage and to take questions.

Furthermore, many users of Power Point, or of the do-it-yourself overheads, use them in such a way as to diminish the role of the lecturer either to clarify points or -- to use the language of the College of Deaducation -- as "facilitator." Darned little "facilitating" going on if the presenter limits himself to reading his slide to you aloud while you have read it silently and are waiting for the supporting detail, and the custom of having the slides available for everybody as a handout before the presentation or for later downloading further diminishes the value of the presenter. (But perhaps those uses of "technology" appeal to administrators for just those reasons: once "facilitating" equates to "any dummy can read somebody else's slides^(*)" there's not much point in hiring expensive experts who can distinguish the uninformed question from the subtle but imprecise question, let alone do independent research.

^(*)Knew I had an earlier rant on this!)