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Thursday, November 29, 2007
Podcasting and Bert Dreyfus
I was Bert Dreyfus’ TA for this class for several semesters back in the 90’s, so I guess I’m pretty happy to hear that the enrollment is up:
BERKELEY—Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus’ most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student’s comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.
But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east.The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin’s speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom.
Bert was a big influence on my own teaching style. I learned a lot, watching him do his Bert thing. I think I was the only non-Heidegger-getting TA he kept liking to have around, semester after semester, so he must have thought I was OK, too. He’s really a remarkable guy - remarkably likable, patient, open. He has this weird habit of being totally networked, personally - of knowing so many famous people, academically and otherwise, apparently quite by chance. People who’ve wandered through Berkeley the last half century. And he does it effortlessly, and certainly not sleazily or even schmoozily, or even glad-handedly (whatever the Heideggereze is for that). He doesn’t work the room. It just ... works. So it seems like fate that he would end up with thousands of podcast fans. That is very Bert. (I remember back before we knew who the Unabomber was, except that probably he had been at Berkeley, and we looked at each other - the other graduate students and I - and said: it’s going to turn out he knew Bert. Except of course that wasn’t the case, because that would have been a bad thing. Bert, by contrast, leads a charmed life. And, since everyone likes him, that’s fine by everyone.)
One week last spring, before Apple started promoting the lectures on its home page, one of Dreyfus’ philosophy and literature lectures—he calls it “From Gods to God and Back” - ranked 58th among podcasts on iTunes. It trailed programs from the BBC and Comedy Central but was downloaded more often than NPR’s “This I Believe” and NBC’s “Meet the Press."
Yeah, I remember that lecture.
So. Universities handing out free podcasts. That’s pretty damn great. What do you think?
Comments
I’m a high school student that just stumbled onto the lectures by chance.
And now I think I have a pretty good grasp on Being and Time, which I thought I would have to have waited years for. Dreyfus is awesome.
Heidegger is a boring old German guy, but Dreyfus is electrifying.
I think podcasting and posting lectures on youtube is a great way to open up what was otherwise available to the academy for general use. I’m all for it. It helps me stay engaged with thinkers that I love to read and study in a way that puts some flesh, voice and tone to their thought.
Add to that, it especially helps because I’m not in school right now, at leat for the time being.
The European Graduate School has a great YouTube page, with lectures from Zizek, Hardt, Baudrillard, DeLanda and others.
And yet, ironically, John, Dreyfus kept writing and writing and writing about how disembodied the internet really is and how bad it is that we have come to rely so much on it. (I skimmed through “On the Internet” and I didn’t see much beyond this constant carping, so I gave up. Of course, he would argue that the internet has become more “embodied” now, more interactive—one gets to listen to Dreyfus instead of just reading him!!)
I must confess, shreeharsh, I’ve never actually AGREED with Bert about much. His internet pessimism is all wrong, as you say - I agree with that - and his anti-AI stuff was wrong before that, so far as I’m concerned. (Not that I’m a big Shank-head, strong-AI booster, but I just never saw the Heideggerian stuff as helping sort all this out.)
I just LIKE Bert. And I think he is a fine teacher of intro to existentialism. In a context like that our philosophical differences found their common denominator in the excitement of introducing lots of kids to some really great stuff. And if he read Nietzsche differently than I, well at least the character of those disagreements was sufficiently high-level that we could meet fine on the introductory level.
I feel like I learned to teach from Bert. So I owe him that.
Yeah, I do find the “On Internet” stuff quite ironic.
It’s great the US universities are opening their lectures to the public - some Geography podcasts made me go back to university to study politics and sociology.
The UK is much further behind. Why do you think that is?
Do we care too much about intellectual property, or protecting intellectuals’ egos?
It’s not just pretty damn great, it’s my day job. (Well, same group—I’ll probably get rotated into the project at some point.) With all due respect to Apple, I’m most impressed by the co-workers who, years before iTunes U, pushed successfully for open access.
Naadir, it’s not just the UK. During the early years of the web, many of the faculty and other university personnel I encountered were as FUD-ridden as unpublished novelists who worry that the slush-reader will steal their ideas. My own (very likely wrong) outsider take was that academic careers rely on closed processes to an extent that intensifies the usual agoraphobia. I think “our” apparent lead at the moment is largely a matter of being bigger, and therefore having more young grad students and faculty willing to cross the line. Once enough of them do it, the hangbacks begin to look more eccentric than principled, even if they’re in the majority: psychologically, visible numbers weigh more than invisible ones.
European Graduate School link.
That’s great. I listen to Anthony Joseph’s UC computer science podcasts.
The article calls attention to the different distribution venues for lecture podcasts, such as YouTube and iTunes. There’s gotta be a push for space within department sites - feeds, channels, components - to eventually broadcast this sort of thing, though. I’m a little surprised, maybe, that content seems to be available from schools I would’ve thought could’ve handled traffic issues - I go to MIT OCWare directly, after all - instead of schools that lack stronger tech infrastructure; so I wonder, in other words how much of the public benefit is associated with a desire to market a school (one that might mitigate IP concerns). That’s not meant to be cynical. The more, the better, at this point. I think there’s a couple of ways to look at a question like “why iTunes?” though -
Since iTunes U is pretty full, and colleges are “building” their own pages - what does that mean? - I think there’s also a question about who’s going to maintain content on department websites - what kind of funding opportunities that presents for grad students if they can wrangle some of the duties away from IT staff and whoever else handles the partnership. Does anybody have any experience with setting up podcasts in iTunes U?
I’d better very quickly add that my Fear-Uncertainty-and-Dread crack applies to open access in general—to research materials and finished papers, for example—not specifically to webcast lectures-and-discussions. Some very talented teachers are very concerned about class-cutters. As an incorrigible class-cutter who even when in class would often drift into revery and benefit by access to a later memory-refresher, I have a hard time sharing their concern. But I can see why they wouldn’t want to encourage the production of students like myself.
Ray: Thanks for that.
I think research open access will be forced upon universities by funding bodies. This is certainly the case for Wellcome Trust and UK Medical Research Council funded projects.
As a faculty IT staff, I think you may be right about the size of American universities. I wont say any more for obvious reasons.
Jason, next week I’ll drop a note to one of the local webcast team and see if they have time to stop by. As far as I could tell, though, our motive in hooking up with iTunes was pretty idealistic: letting more people know what was available and letting more people reach it are clearly in the spirit of open access and public service. We continue to maintain our in-house identity and servers.
Well thanks Ray. And I certainly agree with the motive, as well as being curious about the sort of user environment uni websites will eventually provide.
My own intro philosophy module - this semester I have 520 students - has been webcast for the last 8 semesters or so. I think I was one of the first profs. in the faculty of Arts & Social Sciences to request it. I’ve never actually asked NUS about the possibility of general free release. I probably should. I think when you move to the next level, you feel a little additional twinge of anxiety. Because, truth is, sometimes you give an awful lecture. And it would be nice for it to go away forever. On the other hand, the desire NOT to give a crap lecture, when you know it will NOT go away, is a very salutary motivating factor. The thought that your off-day idiot blatherings could lurk in the bowels of iTunes until the end of time is sort of hellish. Well, nervous-making.
There is a certain amount of just plain performance anxiety, the first time you are being recorded. You have to learn how to talk into the mic and so forth. And ... it’s just new. I’ve had veteran lecturers sub for me and then, when I remembered to tell them it would be webcast, get a twinge of nervousness. (They didn’t balk at lecturing to a giant hall, but being videotaped seemed somehow new.)
It also does lower attendance. I’ve gotten stuck with 8 AM slots a couple semesters. 8 AM + webcast = a serious drop in attendance. When you have 500 students, you never have to worry about an actually empty hall but I think it’s sort of vaguely depressing for everyone - lecturer and students - to look at the empty seats and realize that half the class slept in. For some students that is very bad. It means they never show up and nurture vague, delusional plans for marathon 24 hour cramming sessions, at semester’s end. Of course that never happens.
But webcasting is so clearly valuable in other ways - the uses so manifestly outweigh the abuses - that I have no doubt, on the whole, it’s a good thing.
By the way, Ray, I never realized you were responsible for the webcast stuff, per se. Maybe you told me and I forgot.
There’s another hellish aspect to the preservation of lectures beyond the anxiety of the lecturer that bad lectures will be preserved.
As an undergraduate, I dozed through so many classes that eventually, in my sophomore year or so, I mostly stopped going to them. I’d go the first couple of times and make friends with people to study with who would hopefully tell me when the tests were going to be, and I’d figure out how to find out what the homework was. Then I’d just do the homework and meet with study groups and read the text and cram before the tests. Occasionally there was a bad moment, as when I once missed a senior physics test I hadn’t known was coming, and convinced the prof to let me retake it later that day and then discovered that I hadn’t studied for it. But I managed to keep a B+ average until I reached the senior-level astrophysics courses that I was actually interested in, at which point I started attending classes again.
But all of this determined skipping of classes leaves a bad taste with one’s superego. You know those dreams where you have to go back to a long-finished grade of school and take some test on material that you’ve long forgotten? (Well, I used to have them; I assume that other people sometimes do.) I can easily imagine a recurring nightmare in which I am sat down, Clockwork Orange style, and presented with the full sequence of tapes of all the lectures that I’ve ever skipped, and have to watch them, one after another, until I really learn all the things I was supposed to learn. Yikes.
I think this is absolutely wonderful and want to thank John for linking it here. It’s potentially an excellent aid to self-study, although for most not enrolled at a university, the obstacle of not having access to a decent library will of course remain.
There are a range of differences that I think will stop this taking off in the UK. First, for Arts & Humanities subjects, lectures to 250 or 500 students are very unusual - it is usually less than 50. Since it is often lecturers, rather than TAs, leading tutorials, there is a more organic connection between lectures and tutorials, and in some cases these can be entirely fused together. For all of these reasons, I think British lecturers would be even more reluctant to do anything to encourage students to cut classes than American lecturers might be.
And this situation maybe helps to account for some differences in attitudes towards recording: if you are talking to 500 people, you already feel as though you are ‘performing’ in a way that is different from addressing 20 people.
So I don’t think it is really a matter of fearing that people will steal your ideas - there are not that many undergraduate courses that mostly consist of substantially new material (though I did have the fortune to take one such course); it is usually a matter of introducing students to a set of issues and debates that structure that field of inquiry.
Finally, most of the academics I know, who so despair of students who don’t turn up, or who don’t pay any attention when they do - probably would never imagine that anyone outside of their classroom would have any interest in what they had to say anyway. In many cases, they would be right.
next week I’ll drop a note to one of the local webcast team and see if they have time to stop by
That’s good of you, Ray. Thanks. Also I don’t want to come across as, like I said, cynical - I agree that the OA spirit is well served, etc. Would love to see more of this, of course. Just curious about how much content yr typical U. site can/will eventually deliver, & how, & whether that’s being integrated into long-term plans.
John: Yikes! I don’t actually work on the webcast project—I work in the same group, one of the things I found attractive about joining the group was the webcast project, some of the people on the project work in the same room, and I’m pretty sure I’ll end up contributing there sometime because we like to rotate responsibilities. But the projects I’ve contributed to have been in other areas. Damn it.
Yeah, I can understand that whole “now everyone sees all my crappy moments forever!” nausea, especially since I’m such a revision fanatic. I seem to bracket public performances off into a “fallibility is permitted” part of my mind, but if public performance was more central to my livelihood that might not be so easy. (Some people harbor similar fears about non-pseudonymous blogs, of course.)
Simon, thanks for correcting my ignorant assumptions. That all makes a lot of sense.