There is hope for me yet …

cc licensed flickr photo by RuffLife: http://flickr.com/photos/rufflife/5107716980/

My Dad used to have one of these old reel to reel tape recorders. He had it all set up so he could record himself “murdering” (his word) on the piano whichever bit of popular easy listening had taken his fancy most recently. He was / still is actually pretty good, not that you can ever persuade him of the fact …

One day, many years ago, he recorded me reading something or the other out loud (the exact details are lost in the mists of time) and then played it back to me. I was absolutely horrified at the sound of my own voice ! To hear myself as others must have heard me ! I didn’t want to speak again for about a month ! I sounded so dozy and absolutely nothing like my own impression of what I sounded like. As a result of that single event, I now avoid being recorded like the plague, either audio or video. I did have to be recorded a bit during my teacher training (video) and I hated every minute of it – even though I found it very useful …

Still … I digress …

Lecture capture is one of those things that rears its head occasionally and then, like Nessy, vanishes back under the surface with barely a ripple, to rear again another day.

Many people hate the idea:

• Some worry they’ll get all camera shy and look daft.  Why you’d worry about a camera when standing up and talking in front of 200 people, I don’t really know … but it takes all sorts I guess !
• Others take the attitude that the lecture is an outdated, ineffectual artifact from a bygone age and has been superseded by other teaching methods, so why bother capturing it !  Their rather vitriolic sentiment … not necessarily mine.
• Some get all excited about their intellectual property being captured in the lecture.
  (“excited” and “intellectual property” – not often seen in the same sentence …)
• Some just feel it is generally pointless and the time and energy expended on it would be better spent elsewhere.
• And of course … nearly everyone frets that if they record their lectures, then no students will actually turn up to experience them “live”.  They’ll all watch lounging round in their pyjamas at home, in between repeat episodes of “In the Night Garden” and “Waybuloo” while eating Twiglets … or something …

This post however, on one of Donald Clark’s many blogs, brings a study clearly showing that students gain from the use of lecture capture to our attention. Have a look at it.

(I think Mr Clark falls clearly into at least one of the bullet pointed camps above, but don’t hold that against him.  He’s a learning technologist.)

Point seven looks especially interesting to me.  I wonder if Media Services could edit my two hours of anecdote filled rambling down to a slick 15 minutes of professionally delivered content ?

Lecture capture is potentially on the way.  Perhaps we have to learn to embrace it and make it beautiful, before it gets here.