Lectures

What are they good for? So far, I have only relied on lectures when I teach online asynchronously. That could change in the future.

As I have used them, the main point of lectures is to share an example of what it looks like to think and talk about information architecture. I hope the students will have different ideas, but I intend to demonstrate how to put them together. They tend to include a few things:

1. The intellectual tools I use. I want to demonstrate how I make connections, analyze arguments, and use disparate sources to create meaning, so students can try doing it on their own in their reflections and papers.
2. The intellectual posture of information architecture. Like many disciplines, IA has a way that people approach problems and style of thinking that is valued by the discipline. It’s easier and more effective to show students an example of working with models and metaphors and how to connect ideas, than to tell them exactly how to do it.
3. A rationale for why I asked them to read the texts on the reading list and what they have to do with each other. I have a little bit of fun with my reading lists, and it may not be immediately apparent what some of the readings have to do with the subject matter, because they’re related through metaphor or analogy. IA is a brand new discipline, and there isn’t a deep literature to draw from. If we’re going to do intellectual work here, we need to draw on other disciplines. The lectures give students a starting point for “why this?”
4. Glosses of important ideas from useful sources that I didn’t assign because they’re inaccessible or too long. I’m not going to make everybody track down an out-of-print book from 1973 that I read, no matter how useful it is. Instead, I’ll present its ideas in a lecture.
5. A chance for some rapport between the students and me, to give them a chance to get a sense for what I’m like, how I think, etc. My hope is that it helps contextualize feedbackand makes coming to office hours and asking questions not so intimidating. 

   References

   But, Juanita C., editor. Teaching College-Level Disciplinary Literacy: Strategies and Practices in STEM and Professional Studies. Springer International Publishing, 2020.

Experts have lots of tools to bring to understanding a text; they can use these tools to make connections, analyze and evaluate arguments, and generate meaning. Students don’t generally have these tools yet. p.4

A big part of becoming comfortable in a discipline is being able to adopt the posture, that is, the habits of thinking and the practices valued and used, by the discipline. p. 5