The Mobile Lecture
Peggy Jubien
Prologue
Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus’ most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student’s comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.
But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east. The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them [to his] digital media player, then piping them through his cabin’s speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom.
“I’m really in two places at once,” he said. “The sound of chalk on the chalkboard makes it so real.”(Quinn, 2007, p. 1)
The ending of this story may be a surprise for many readers. Although it describes the familiar experience of listening to a lecture, the location the student is listening from may be unexpected. By the end of the first paragraph, we might have pictured Woods sitting keenly in the front row of a lecture hall, notebook in hand, intently scribbling down Dreyfus� every word. But he was not in a classroom at all; he was listening to a podcast of Dreyfus� lectures while he drives across America. The story may make us pause and wonder: How is Wood�s experience of listening to a lecture on his media player somehow different than if he were sitting in the actual classroom with Dreyfus? What makes a lecture experience unique? What are the qualities and experiences that make it possible to call a lecture, a lecture?
Introduction
Listening to recorded lectures outside the classroom is more common now than it was in the past, thanks to the widespread availability of recorded lectures and the affordability of mobile technologies. Many people, both professionals and amateurs, can easily record, publish and distribute their lectures on the Internet. Today, there are lecture podcasts available on an astounding range of topics, from airlines and gerontology to medicine and zoology. These podcasts can be quickly accessed and downloaded from the Internet, transferred to a mobile device and listened to at any time. But in the past, listening to recorded lectures was an uncommon experience. Students who took correspondence courses and those who made tapes of lectures they heard on the radio were among those who were familiar with listening to recorded lectures. But now that recorded lectures (or podcasts) are so common, we might wonder, how is the experience of listening to a recorded lecture different than the experience of listening in a classroom or lecture hall? Can the experience of listening in classrooms be duplicated on mobile devices like MP3 players and smart phones?
Grasping the differences between listening to �real time� vs. recorded lectures is difficult since it requires us to notice what unfolds as we listen to lectures delivered in classrooms and then compare this to our experience of listening to recorded lectures. Some of us have never examined or considered what it is really like to listen to a lecture in a classroom. We take this experience for granted.
Another hurdle that may prevent us from carefully considering in-person and recorded lectures is the temptation to assume that one type of lecture is inherently better than the other. In this era of technology integration in so many areas of life, some people claim that recorded lectures will improve and enhance education or vice versa people who are suspicious of the effects of the new technologies will be loath to admit that recorded lectures may offer advantages. But before we leap to any conclusion, it may be helpful to first look carefully at both types of lectures and see some of the similarities and differences between them. By doing this, it may be possible understand what it is like to listen to recorded lectures and examine some of the aspects that make this experience unique.
What it is like to listen to recorded lectures on mobile devices? We need to look carefully at experiences that are a regular part of many people�s everyday world in order to learn more about this topic. I use van Manen�s (1997) four existentials of spatiality, corporeality, temporality and relationality as a guide for this phenomenological study. By considering our lived sense of space, body, time and relationship with others, I hope to bring to the foreground an experience that is frequently in the background of our everyday experience.
Shifting Place
Considering the notion of place or where we are when we listen to lectures seems to be a good place beginning for this study because place is often mentioned in students� descriptions of pre-recorded lectures. For instance, one student, Brent, says, �After listening for a week or two during my morning commute, I actually began to hope for traffic delays because that meant that I could listen to more of the lecture.� Meanwhile, Baxter Woods says: �I’m really in two places at once.� Where exactly are we when we listen? Are we in the lecture or sitting in traffic? The same question may be relevant to in-person lectures; as we listen, are we in the room with the instructor and the other students or are we staring out the window and imagining ourselves elsewhere? While it may not be possible to know whether students are truly present while they listen to either type of lecture, it seems that listening to recorded lectures can intensify the experience of being in two places at once.
Inattentive attention
While we may be corporally present in one physical location, we can also be mentally present in another. For example, we routinely shift places and attend to what is going on in two places at once when we drive our cars and listen to the radio. As we attend to the routine tasks of steering, shifting gears and changing lanes, we can also listen attentively to an interesting radio broadcast or lecture podcast. It seems that while we focus on the pre-recorded lecture and the places that it suggests, our physical location and what we are doing there temporarily drift into the background of our attention. We are often unaware that this shift has occurred; we may only become aware that it has when someone asks us afterwards: �Were you caught by all the red lights on your way home?� Then we realize that we have actually no or little memory of whether we had red or green lights during our drive. Sometimes, we are unable to remember anything about the trip expect for what we heard in the broadcast or lecture. We were so focused on the words of the lecture that we only gave the drive and traffic conditions our automatic attention. Although our physical location changed while we were driving, we did not really notice this because we were absorbed by the words and conjured images of the lecture. There seems to be a kind of inattentive attention that we use to manage the familiar task of driving a car. As we drive with our inattentive attention, we give the lecture our conscious attention. We have shifted places from our cars to the lecture without even realizing it.
This sense of shifting places and our experience of giving some activities only our inattentive attention and others our focused attention is perhaps a type of multi-tasking, since we are attending to two (or more) activities at once. While it may appear that we are attending to driving and listening equally, it may be that we are really only focused on one task at a time and imperceptibly switching back and forth between them. When an activity is difficult or unfamiliar, we may be more aware of how we are switching back and forth between tasks. For instance, one student says, �Sometimes I stop what I�m doing and then realize that I am listening to the podcast in English, which not in my first language.� This story hints at the way that we are attentive or inattentive to activities, depending on how familiar we are with them. When something becomes easier, we may give it our inattentive attention without realizing that we have invisibly switched from focused to inattentive attention. This subtle switching of attention seems to be part of our experience of shifting places when we listen to recorded lectures.
It seems that a shifting of places is also part of the experience of listening to lectures on mobile devices. It is possible to attend to life as it is unfolding in the present time while we simultaneously travel to other places with the speaker. But how does this experience occur? How do we shift so effortlessly between the places we are in and the places suggested by the lecture? Do we shift only once between these places or do we drift back and forth between them while we listen and attend to other things?
Our ability to shift effortlessly between listening and attending to other tasks is similar to how we see objects and people with our eyes. If we are sitting in a crowded restaurant with a friend, it is possible to focus on them and let everything else fade into our peripheral field of attention. Although we may occasionally notice the bright jacket of someone who is sitting nearby or momentarily see the waiter approaching from behind with our orders, we do not see these blurred objects as much as we �see� our friend. With our visual and auditory senses, we are able to undetectably shift between what we notice and attend to. This shifting makes it difficult to know precisely where we are when we listen to recorded lectures. Perhaps all we can say is that we are somewhere in between the lecture and the world, impermeably weaving in between them, with the help of our focused and inattentive attentiveness.
It appears that our sense of place is not static but instead is a constantly changing experience. We do not simply enter the space of the lecture and then settle comfortably into it. Instead, our attention moves back and forth between the lecture and our surroundings. One student, Natasha, describes her sense of place like this: �The [train] platform is packed with chatting students getting home after class. Next to me are two young girls discussing failed relationships. They are blissfully unaware of my presence on the crowded platform. I pull out my MP3 player and look for a lecture that will take me away from being right here, right now.� In this case, the student intentionally shifts her attention away from the place of her surroundings towards the place of the lecture. Through the words of the speaker and the images they suggest, she can imagine being elsewhere from the place she physically embodies for a time. Listening to lectures allows her to temporarily escape from her surroundings when she wants to leave them behind and go, in a virtual sense perhaps, to another place.
This sense of shifting place also appears in other descriptions. As Conrad puts it, �I push the ear buds into my ears as I leave the house on my run. I head down the street, towards the park where I like to go. Pretty soon, my surroundings are a blur; I am focused on what the speaker is saying and try to keep my pace up.� Another student, Connie says, �I collapse into a seat on the bus after work, I�m so glad to sit down after a busy day. I pull my iPod out of my pocket and scroll through the files looking for the lecture that I need to listen to for class this week. I turn up the volume so I can hear my instructor over the person who is sitting in front of me. I hate it when someone else�s music is so loud because then I can�t hear what my professor is saying.� In this story, the listener also intentionally tries to move into the world of the lecture and away from where she is during her commute. But she has difficulty doing this and finds that she is temporarily pulled back into her surroundings because of the noise from the person nearby.�Listening to recorded lectures may allow listeners to shake free from the constraints of their physical locations and travel somewhere else which (temporarily) can seem to be just as real to them as the places they left behind.
Many people who listen to recorded lectures also move physically through space. The mobility and movement of listeners seems to be a unique feature of experiencing recorded lectures. Although students could access lecture recordings from their laptop computers and stereos before mobile devices were invented, the number of settings they could listen from was limited. One student says �I load the first CD into my stereo, grab the remote, a pen and a notebook and crawl back under the covers. As I sit comfortably in my pajamas in bed listening to the instructor�s voice, I try to picture how he would look if he were standing in front of me in a lecture hall.� In this example, the student is sitting in bed while she listens to the lecture and she is not moving through space. With the widespread increase and affordability of mobile devices, it is easier than ever to tuck a lecture into our pockets while we go running or travel on the bus. Mobile devices are small and portable and they allow us to listen to recorded lectures in more places than before.
Sense of Others
In addition to considering the sense of space in recorded lectures, we can also consider the sense of others. We may wonder what makes the experience of attending in-person lectures different from listening to recorded ones and whether it is necessary for students and instructors to be physically present with one another, in the same space and time to call the experience a real lecture. When students and instructors share the same physical space and time, there is the potential to experience an atmosphere of mutual presence. We can see the instructor and the other students and they can see us. We can observe their facial expressions and their postures and they can do the same of us. If we attend a series of lectures over a semester with the same instructor and students, we may begin to notice predictable patterns of behavior, such as whether the instructor seems rushed or calm, whether he or she prefers to answer questions during their presentations or at the end and which students dominate the discussions and which are usually quiet. Although these elements are not a core part of the content of the lecture, they seem to be important and defining features of in-person lectures that set them apart from pre-recorded ones. These elements contribute to the sense of mutual presence that can occur in live, in-person lectures.
Sometimes, this sense of mutuality is not present. As one student, Rhonda puts it, �I was in a class of several hundred. The instructor stood at the front of the room and talked. Very few students were brave enough to ask questions. I am certain he had no idea who I was.� Although in-person lectures have the potential to create mutual presence, they do not always do so.
But what happens to this sense of presence in recorded lectures? Is it reduced? Or does it disappear completely? By looking at students� accounts of listening to recorded lectures, we can gain insight into this question. One student says, �At the beginning, the professor�s nasal-sounding voice was distracting but now I�m used to it. I know that he will begin talking about one topic but then he will go off on a side topic and then he won�t remember what he was originally talking about. I�m used to him now.� In the prologue at the beginning, Woods describes how he follows recorded lectures closely and �hangs� on every word the instructor says. In these examples, it seems that the students have a sense of the instructor�s presence; this part of the experience has been preserved.
What about the instructor�s sense of students? It seems to be missing in these two students� stories. That is because recorded lectures only allow for one-way communication, not two-way communication. Students can hear their instructors but the instructors cannot hear them. In this case, there is a sense of one-sided knowing, rather than mutual presence. Could we describe this one-sided knowing as �eavesdropping?� According to the dictionary, one of the definitions of eavesdropping is to �listen secretly.� Is this what students are experiencing when they listen to recorded lectures? In some respect, this seems true especially if students listen with headphones that allow them to be the only ones who hear the lecture. They are in a secret world, surrounded by the sound of the lecture but not actively participating in it.
Of course, students who attend in-person lectures can also dip in and out of the lecture at any time; they have the freedom to surf the web, send text messages or stare out the window to daydream while the instructor is talking. But there are some social norms in place when students and instructors are together in the same room participating in a lecture, which may influence their mutual sense of presence. Most students will occasionally look at the instructor, some may make eye contact, and a few will nod their heads in understanding or acknowledgement. This brief or subtle interaction can create a sense of shared presence and experience.
In contrast, our sense of relationality in recorded lectures can include more than just the instructor and other students. We can also have a sense of the people around us as we listen. One person tells us, �I am sitting in my comfy chair by the window searching for the lecture on my iPod. I put in my ear buds so as not to disturb my son working on his homework at a nearby table. This is the third or fourth time I�ve sat down to try to finish listening to this. Listening to the lecture, I find myself quietly watching my son bent over his books. I am slowly catching the drift of the lecture. My son catches my eye and smiles at me. I smile back and suddenly realize I lost the last snippet of what was said. I scroll back a little and continue once again.� In this example, there is a sense of others because the listener interacts with her son. But this interaction appears to be different than the experience of catching a colleague�s eye across the room while you listen to an in-person lecture. In the colleague example, the listener interacts with someone who they know from a public space, the workplace. But in the first example, the listener interacts with someone from her private life, her family. Our sense of others in recorded lectures can include people who are outside the lecture experience. This is different from live lectures when we interact with others who are inside the lecture experience.
The presence of others can be negative while we listen to lectures. Take for example, one student who recounted this story: �This strange woman kept talking to me, even though I didn�t know her. At first, I nodded to be polite but then she got too annoying. To escape, I turned up the volume on the lecture I was listening to on my iPod. I put the ear buds back into my ears, stared ahead and tried to ignore her. I hoped she would stop talking to me soon.� This interaction, however brief, shows that while we can have a sense of others while we listen to recorded lectures, it is not always mutually agreeable.
Of course, this experience may also occur during in-person lectures, but with some variations. Although we may occasionally whisper to the student next to us or nod to acknowledge something the instructor says, we rarely use the lecture itself as a means to escape from our exasperating neighbours. We were taught that everyone should sit quietly together and refrain from talking to each other for long during the lecture. Most of us politely sit down and give the lecturer our attention (or at least the appearance of our attention). But in recorded lectures there are no such social conventions; we listen from a wide variety of locations, including public places such as bus stops, subways and coffee shops and we sometimes use the lecture as a means to escape from our neighbours. When we do this, we purposely avoid a sense of those who are nearby.
It seems that our sense of others when we listen to recorded lectures is complex and varied. We can have positive and negative experiences of others, we can include people who are outside the lecture entirely and we can make the lecture our means of escaping from unwelcomed contact with others. All these variations make it impossible to provide one single, definitive description of the way we experience others in lectures. Despite this complexity and variation however, there is something that all recorded lectures have in common; the instructor�s voice. As Campbell (2005) puts it �There is magic in the human voice, the magic of shared awareness. Consciousness is most persuasively and intimately communicated via voice. The voice is literally inspired language, language full of breath, breath as language� (p. 40). Perhaps it is through instructors� voices that we have a sense of others while we listen to recorded lectures. Indeed, students talk about their instructors� voices when they describe their listening experiences. In one case, the student says, �I am learning more everyday that I listen. I feel like I know you and your quirky sense of humour!� Another student says, �I listen to every podcast, often many times. You are like my friend.� For these students, it is through the instructor�s voice that they gain a sense of others and discover some of their unique qualities, such as a sense of humour and capacity for understanding. Through their instructor�s voice, students gain a sense of knowing someone else while they listen to recorded lectures.
Sense of Time
Another way of understanding lectures is to consider our sense of time and how we experience it. Recorded lectures have the potential to change our relationship with time because they allow us to pause, rewind and re-listen to the lecture as many times as we want. It is simply impossible to �pause� an in-person lecture, even though we may sometimes wish to do so. When lectures are recorded, they become episodes or events that can be repeated and re-experienced by listeners infinite times. This is an important distinction between recorded and in-person lectures. Recorded lectures can be repeated but live in-person lectures occur only once.
Pausing, rewinding and replaying time
With recorded lectures, students can also control their rate of listening. As one student puts it, �I skipped a large percentage of the podcast I listened to today because it was boring and simply not in my area of interest. I can’t imagine listening to a talk show on the radio anymore. I�m too impatient and would want to fast-forward through most of it!� Another person describes how he often speeds up the rate of his podcasts by 50% on his MP3 player so that he can get through a 45-minute podcast in 30 minutes or less. Another student says, �When I listen to it at regular speed, it feels unbelievable relaxed. It�s the same as driving on the highway and then suddenly slowing down to school-zone speeds � it�s like coming to a complete and sudden stop.� �This focus on time and the desire to control it, manage it, rewind it and distort it seems to be a defining feature of recorded or podcast lectures. Although we may not be aware of it, our relationship with time changes when we replay lectures because we can experience the past and the present at the same time.
Sense of Body
The last existential, our sense of corporeality, is perhaps the most elusive element of the experience of listening to recorded lectures. On one hand, our bodily sense is taken for granted as part of the three other existential. We use our legs and feet to walk or jog through space, our hands to adjust the start, stop and volume buttons and our eyes and body language to tell others nearby that we either welcome or reject their presence in our semi-private world. We may smile across the room at someone and invite them into our space or we may turn our backs and close ourselves off from them. On the other hand, in normal everyday situations we tend to meet other people first of all through their bodies. And wittingly or unwittingly we have an immediate sense of their being.
Our sensed body is also a part of listening to live lectures. While we attend a live lecture, we may notice the temperature in the room, the smells of perfumes or other strong odors and we may observe what other people are wearing. Here, our sense of body seems more complex than recorded lectures because there are so many ways that we can experience the lecture and our surroundings. In recorded lectures, our ears and bodies receive sound waves and all that is technically required to receive and process them are our ears and minds. But it would be too simplistic to conclude from this that our ears are the only parts of us that experience recorded lectures.
Conclusion
In some of the stories mentioned earlier in this study, there are glimpses of the body. Students tell us that they �pull out their MP3 players�, �push their ear buds in� and �catch their son�s eye�. Each of these experiences is only possible through our bodies. Sch�nhammer (1989) reminds us that, �The familiar environment in which one lives and moves takes on a strange character when one is separated from the acoustic part of it.� (p. 6). Perhaps this also can happen when we listen to recorded lectures. Our bodies may take on a strange or unfamiliar quality when they are separated from the embodied experience of attending live lectures. Campbell (2005) says that �…a voice that creates a theater of the mind�radio�s time-honored heritage�can connect with the listener on a profound level. The theater of the mind can be both compelling and transformative, often far more than anything witnessed visually.� (p. 42). This sense of connection also involves our bodies but in ways that we may not be aware of. It seems that in our corporeality sense, there is much that we are not aware of or understand. We do not fully know what happens to our bodies when the auditory part of lectures is separated from attending in person.
References
Campbell, G. (2005). There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education. EDUCAUSE Review, 40(6), 32-47.
Quinn, M. (2007, November 24). The iPod lecture circuit. Los Angeles Times, p. 1.
Schonhammer, R. (1989). The Walkman and the Primary World of the Senses. Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 7, 127-144.
Van Manen, M. (1997). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (2nd ed.). London: ON: Althouse Press.