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How to secretly record lectures9/10/2023 ![]() In a world where writing is cheap and literacy is almost universal, it is hard to imagine just how scarce they were back then. The academic lecture has its origins in the European Middle Ages, when both literacy – the ability to read and write – and books were scarce. Miniature drawing of a medieval lecture (Image credit: British Library) How did such an awkward genre become the main mode of university teaching? Even so, I’m now I’m beating myself up for uneven delivery – there are a few unfinished thoughts and dysfluencies. In face-to-face teaching, I don’t need one and for pre-recordings the general advice seems to be that a script will make the lecture sound unnatural. For instance, I did not write up the lecture beforehand and so did not read out a script. These mismatched criteria produce a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” genre. I don’t even need to mention that the content of the lecture is relatively abstract (“Features of written language”) and that I delivered a monologue. ![]() However, on listening back, I discovered that I used a garden path sentence to exemplify one, and I also used words such as “therefore” and “thus” – clear traces of written language. In terms of syntactic complexity and formality, I was aiming for a simple and casual style – the desired “conversational tone” of a podcast.The lecture is planned and tightly structured.The lecture is not quite as scannable as a written text but you can certainly stop and rewind if there is something you didn’t understand, or jump ahead if you get bored.The recording is durable and not as fleeting as the spoken word usually is.In terms of context, the lecture sits somewhere in the middle between high and low context (it’s part of a unit taught in the Applied Linguistics program at Macquarie University but it could be taught in any Applied Linguistics program in an English-medium program).Speaker and audience are distant across time and space (I recorded the lecture yesterday in my home and students will listen to it at other times and places).The lecture is technologically mediated (recording device at my end, audio player at yours).However, most of its characteristics are typically associated not with spoken but with written language: The academic lecture, including in its pre-recorded version, is obviously a form of spoken language. Written languageĭistant interactants (across time and space) Lectures are odd creatures at the intersection of reading and writing, as a quick look at the table listing the key differences between written and spoken language will show. Maybe it’s not me at all but the problem is the genre of the academic lecture? What’s wrong with lectures? Seeing how much time I invested, I’m wondering where did I go wrong? I’m dissatisfied with recurring disfluencies, with too much detail in some parts and not enough in others, a joke that I started and then trailed off because it seemed silly delivering it to the unmoved microphone. I may have smoothed out major bloopers but the final product still doesn’t please me and doesn’t meet my usual standards of work. This way you can easily identify the bits you’ll need to cut in your voice editor. Instead, pause, click your tongue three times, and repeat whatever went wrong. Hot tip: If you are unhappy with anything you’ve recorded, don’t stop recording. Quite a bit of time also went to editing in order to smooth out bloopers. Including a signature tune is a playful option that is obviously not strictly necessary but was fun to learn. Most of this production time is a one-off, as I needed to learn how to use Adobe Audition and spent a lot of time designing an intro and an outro, and figuring out how to overlay them with a signature tune (I chose a few bars of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto :-). Without dialogue, the lecture shrunk to not much more than a third of the time it would normally take but producing it blew out by about nine times. ![]() A standard teacher question-student response-teacher feedback cycle. That includes asking questions, taking student responses, and summarizing those responses. ![]() The content I was covering yesterday – features of written vs spoken language – usually takes about 40 minutes of class time to deliver. It did not turn out to be a smooth experience. I’ve taught the unit a couple of times already so have the content down pat and figured all I needed to do was sit down and deliver my lecture into a microphone. One element in the overall mix is a podcast series. The unit has gone fully online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and I have been planning for interactive delivery in a variety of formats. Yesterday, I spent six hours pre-recording a puny little lecture of 15 minutes for the postgraduate “ Literacies” unit I’m teaching this term. ![]() My “audience” as I was recording the first online lecture for the new term ![]()
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