Jon SterlingJan 27, 2025

I have broken it to my students that I will not be releasing lecture recordings anymore (except in cases where it is warranted—put away your pitchforks!). The reaction is like watching a demon being exorcised... one passes through each stage of grief. By the way, to make up for this, I have made commitments to my students of personal engagement that go far beyond what almost any other lecturer here offers.

This could be catastrophic for my ratings, but in the end, I want to give great and engaging lectures that delight and encourage my students. And the twin evils of (1) being on the record at all times, and (2) having recording policies that make it benefit-negative for students to attend Lecture makes it nearly impossible for me to do that.

So I'm taking a stand.

Show threadBoardersJan 27, 2025
@jonmsterling though I am a critic of “back to office” policies (since I see unwavering corporate policies as rigidly implemented and exclusionary of women from participating in public life), I do believe the collective unconscious will, and is, shifting back towards understanding that we are physically embodied and being in a lecture course with your fellow students and instructors is actually not going to be replaced by watching on YouTube (we are years out from the MOOC fantasy, and yet it remains like a living zombie)
Show threadEli 💚 chaos 🌋🎲👾Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @jonmsterling Most universities are not designed for remote learning like e.g The Open University is, which functions very differently from MOOC-type courses or like whatever universities were forced to do during the pandemic. We have small lectures/tutorials where students are actively engaged, we have our own books that are externally reviewed all the time and are very well-made, and most students (esp those who continue year after year) are super motivated. 1/2
Show threadEli 💚 chaos 🌋🎲👾Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @jonmsterling Basically there needs to be a lot of funding to support proper remote learning but the way it was done during the pandemic in regular unis is not it and it's good that we are throwing that out, yet we should be thinking how to make it better and get funding for developing these programs because there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to study otherwise. Just having lectures recorded and lecture notes online is nothing in comparison to what we could have.
Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025

@eli @boarders @jonmsterling i disagree with this - i think that lecture notes slides and notes specifically are one of the most valuable things to make public. i don't think there needs to be much of anything proper about it to get 90% of the benefit.

very frequently when i am trying to learn some topic some professor's lecture notes not only come up but are the only thing that comes up. i think people underestimate the utility of just... information, freely online. for more introductory topics where there are plenty of existing resources online, sure, putting them online without some structure is probably not too valuable. but this is not the case for ex. any linguistics material past the third year.

(and also, personal opinion: i don't think remote learning ever was good over the pandemic...)

Show threadBoardersJan 27, 2025

@jj @eli @jonmsterling I don’t think anyone here is against freely available lecture notes online, certainly not me!* - it is a wider conversation about how learning takes place in community and about what job we expect of lecturers. Should we expect them to also be multimedia producers? If not, should the university hire people to do such work, and if so, how would that look, what is the ideal format in which to run such mixed media classes? etc.

* these resources though are for people who are already self-directed learners which I view as a distinct group from everyone a university is supposed to educate and part of a “liberal arts” education is to liberate one to be free to pursue such ends in such self-directed ways

Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025
@boarders @eli @jonmsterling i don't consider myself a self-directed learner and i think lecture notes are invaluable. the point i'm trying to make is: quite frequently learning materials do not need to be processed or have any notion of quality to be useful - they just need to be out there
Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025

@boarders @eli @jonmsterling these sorts of discussions bother me more than a little bit also. sorry if it's coming across in my tone. please don't take this as a slight though! i think it's valuable to have them.

i think that it is easy to discount how much the university acts not only as a bastion of but as a gatekeeper of knowledge. the pandemic - despite all its downsides, generally and for everyone and for my learning specifically - i hoped it would provide for a shift towards open access of knowledge. much in the way i hoped for generative ai, despite it all, to provide for a dismantlement of the broken system of copyright (rather than reenforce it)

and to see professors pushing back against open access to learning materials and flexible learning environments provokes a bit of a knee-jerk reaction in me regardless of how good-intentioned or well-reasoned it may be

Show threadJon Sterling

@jj @boarders @eli

Just to respond to this:

> and to see professors pushing back against open access to learning materials and flexible learning environments provokes a bit of a knee-jerk reaction in me regardless of how good-intentioned or well-reasoned it may be

There is a reason why I have created all these publicly available lecture notes on my website [https://www.jonmsterling.com/jms-00JB.xml], and densely hyperlinked them in order to make them a viable learning environment for those who don't have access to our courses. Keep in mind that our recorded lectures have *never* been available to the public, so the change I have made has only increased rather than decreased the open access to learning.

Jan 27, 2025 at 5:01pmWeb
Show threadJon SterlingJan 27, 2025

@jj @boarders @eli I think we are in agreement about the importance of open access learning that goes beyond the unfortunate gate-keeping of the university. There may be those among us who disagree, but I am not one of them — and I have (1) put dozens of hours into creating publicly accessible educational materials, and (2) *hundreds* of hours into building software that other instructors can use to create similar open educational materials.

So I agree with your knee-jerk reaction, but I want us to be careful about where we aim the knee.

Show threadJon SterlingJan 27, 2025
@jj @boarders @eli Lastly, if I ever create videos for my students, I will absolutely make them public-access. I am just asking that my faffing around at the blackboard, which can be part of a complex interaction between me and those present, not be made part of the permanent record.
Show threadBoardersJan 27, 2025

@jonmsterling @jj @eli I think Lawvere’s two masterful (and still somehow under-appreciated*) books show that allowing the full, unfettered development of ideas in front of the board like this, and seeing and responding to the resulting confusions, bad lines of thought, or genuine new insights; is ultimately more valuable towards true worthwhile educational material than a thousand video captures

* that these books are easily available and yet not widely read by those wishing to learn category theory shows something important regarding the current limits of a mere philosophy of open access

Show threadJJ Jan 27, 2025
@jonmsterling @boarders @eli i greatly appreciate this! and it's excellent to hear an inside perspective, too. thanks for the conversation :-)