Heuristics for Lecturing

I found this lecture via BoingBoing, a fantastic site for absorbing all those extra minutes every day that you really didn’t need.

This, however, should count as professional development for anyone who lectures in front of a classroom.  It’s a “meta-lecture” in which MIT prof Patrick Winston outlines heuristics he uses in his lectures.  I think he’s spot on for most of his discussion, and I’m especially impressed that he doesn’t use Powerpoint (which I refer to as the “devil’s tool”).  One thing I love about his talk is that he gives it using the very heuristics he’s talking about.  It reminds me a bit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach.

Among the topics he covers are his four rules, “Cycle, Verbal Punctuation, The Near Miss, and Ask a Question,” graphics, and even tidbits like when a group is too large for a seminar (about 10), or for an ordinary lecture without a lot of “showmanship” (about 70).

Check out the lecture here.  If you teach, or even just do presentations in some other forum, it’s a well spent hour.

Renegotiating Time Sinks

This isn’t a dissertation specific thing, but it is great stuff and I think has its applications in academia. I’ve been into “lifehacks” for years, and one of the gurus of the subject is Merlin Mann. He spoke at this year’s Mac World Expo and just posted the speech he gave on “Time and Attention”. I’ll draw your attention to a few things:

• The concept of renegotiating time sinks.
• Firewalling your time.
• And, interesting from a different point of view, his slides are very clean and effective.

Check it out.

Freewriting

Before I started writing the dissertation, I spent a few weeks thinking about the mechanics of the project.  There are several very good books out there for students beginning a long writing project (best:  Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day; Zerubavel, Clockwork Muse), and one thing many of them suggested was “freewriting”.

The idea of freewriting is to sit down at the start of a work day and write for a short period of either time, such as 10 minutes, or length, like two pages.  Once you start writing, you can’t stop or even pause, until you reach the end.  The idea is that the exercise will overcome any start-of-the-day inertia you might have.  Although it’s possible to just write about anything that crosses your mind, I opted to structure the writing a bit.  I drafted up a couple of dozen questions related to my dissertation and randomly chose one to write on at the start of the day.

To my great surprise, I came up with a number of insights during the freewriting that ended up in the final dissertation.  It also pointed out gaps in my arguments and research.  And, as the books promised, it eased me into the day’s writing with much less stress than I’d had before.