Joining Monash University meant some reinvention on my part. Lectures were no longer 'live'. I had to record them. Something I had enjoyed doing all my academic career - prancing around, provoking, improvising, and engaging on a chosen topic - was taken away.
Like others, I found a new way to 'lecture'. My chosen medium is Camtasia recordings. I am an amateur, for sure. But it has been fun to find ways of still being an individual through the various gimmicks and animations. Also, Camtasia recordings (any software I imagine) allow for more compactly conveying the thinking process. A key component of a lecture is not content – you can get that anywhere - but 'thinking aloud', conceptualization, and encouraging that most significant of activities: reading. In reading, students engage with great minds (if readings are chosen well). A lecture is not information transmission but an example of thinking. It is not a list but a process. It should sow doubt about what we know, curiosity about how to better ‘understand’, and a desire to know for, and apply, oneself.
I have found the features of Camtasia to allow visual representation of key concepts in social movement theory (the submitted excerpt is from a lecture on how to think about whether social movements have been successful). Students often engage with concepts as definitions, rather than as a universe of relationships. Breaking them from that is enabled by visual representation and then tutorial application.
The use of visuals to map reading content and conceptual relationships is full of possibilities. I believe in repetition – I am the party bore – and I repeat elements from one lecture in another some weeks down the track. If a student considers each week discrete, then intellectual growth is stalled in modular elements rather than set free across a semester. Conceptual repetition and application embed a discipline’s thinking tools and that is precisely what this excerpt attempts (with follow-up in active learning tutorials).
It is early days using Camtasia for me. But there is one notable outcome: no student asked me for a weekly PowerPoint – that digest of notes that used to be the student's thinking process. Some people are surprised when they learn I didn't use PowerPoint for lecture slides in this class, a bit like how I was surprised that there were people who had stopped using overhead transparencies twenty years ago. Things move on.