THE DIMINUTION OF TEACHING. Welcome, Invisible Adjunct readers. Herewith the promised rant on teaching, which is in general an agreement with Invisible's unhappiness with teaching-as-distraction. (I will let the humanities scholars discover for themselves that "fashionable gibberish" is not the same thing as real research. Game theory is easier going for me than some of the comments in some of the academic weblogs.) But it is to the dimunition of teaching that I wish to speak. Consider what passes for the current model of "teaching" based on a "business presentation": the "facilitator" sits everybody down, dims the lights, and starts running through a Power Point presentation. If the facilitator is particularly bad, the audience gets to read the slide silently while he reads it aloud. (The purpose of a slide, or a few items on a blackboard, is to identify major points. The teacher's job is to elaborate on the major points and to take questions. Got that?) In obeisance to the dictates of "distance learning," the Power Point presentation is available for downloading somewhere, a practice that encourages students to cut class and download the stuff on their own time. That's a bad practice for students to get into when they encounter professors with different styles, although most students are capable of reading silently on their own time. Under such a model, of what use is a scholar who is expected to do original research? Might as well have the University of Phoenix model with people vetted to read other people's slides (although somebody has to be doing some sort of research to keep the slides current, nicht wahr?)

There's just one problem with that "business model." It doesn't work. Pick up any Proceedings issue since about 1990 of the American Economic Review (that's the May issue, for the postulants, novitiates, and non-economists among you) and flip through the table of contents until you find the section devoted to "teaching economics." You will find at least one article arguing that "chalk and talk" doesn't work. Per corollary, Power Point and read doesn't work either. Some professors are catching on. In another 100 years the textbook publishers will figure out that what they're peddling doesn't work either. Passive learning, with memorization of slides and fill-in-the-circles "assessment," does not produce much retention of information, even among people who learn that way. Simulations, questions-and-answers, current events, active learning is more effective. That requires informed scholars who are up on, and under best circumstances, involved in, current research and current tricks of the trade. It's also expensive (that's going to be the rant for later Thursday or Friday, there is a lot of good stuff out there begging for commentary, but I have other commitments.)

Perhaps I'm just playing economics inside baseball. OK, read the master. Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (read it, aspiring curve-benders), pens (keyboards??) a particularly nasty smackdown of Power Point "presentations." Anybody who can make light of Stalin's "bullet list" ought to be widely read. (Thanks to Newmark's Door for finding this.) Alas, the "technology" simply provides another crutch for bad teaching. Kieran Healy has some observations in a similar vein. There is indeed more to it than making use of "technology." I claim that a pack of cards, or an olive tree, are better technology, and the students stay more involved, so they're not instant-messaging, or playing solitaire, or otherwise actively tuning out. (Thinking about their dates, that I can't control, nor would I want to.)