A lecture / presentation / opinion is useless to me if I cannot easily disagree with you. I do not want to be in a 30-minute monologue where you make 10 loosely connected points. I might have a disagreement, but I would not know how to communicate it to you because I do not know precisely what you are saying. As a consequence, I cannot tell you that I disagree with you precisely on XYZ.
This has led me to have a preference order for formats of social knowledge sharing:
- 1-on-1 discussions
- a write-up
- a small-group interactive discussion
- a talk/presentation with slides
I absolutely hate one-to-many style lectures because they generally do not provide the social setting for easy disagree-ability. The act of disagreeing is not essential. It is the ability to do so that makes any learning worthwhile for me. If I cannot specifically point to something from your talk that I can ponder about–something that causes dissonance in me because I feel the need to consider changing my mental models–I have not taken away anything from the knowledge sharing session.
There are formats that are very conducive to this. In a 1-on-1 setting, I can clear all ambiguity about an opinion, ask for clarity on the implicit assumptions you had in coming up with your ideas, and specifically drill down on a point of potential disagreement. I like write-ups because they almost force this kind of clarity in order to be effective. A presentation with slides is less conducive, but I can still refer to the slides and tell you specifically about the points I found confusing or disagreeable.
A talk without slides, as I imagine lectures often are, is a horrible horrible medium. I believe this format came up not from its effectiveness but from its logistical convenience.
At this point, I think you must have started suspecting that I am writing this post out of frustration from having attended such a session rather than rigorous pedagogical research. You would be correct.
In a talk without slides, where there are more than 1 opinions being put forth–all vaguely–the only reasonable conversation I can have with you afterward would start with “you touched on XYZ that I also already had context on. let’s chat more about it.” If you had one webpage that listed these 10 areas of interest, I would have received the same information orders of magnitude more effectively.
I sometimes end up talking at conferences or small events. I have developed a rule-of-thumb method for signal vs. noise separation from the feedback I receive at the end:
- Signals: Clarifications about something I mentioned, or just absolute disagreements with what I spoke about. These exchanges carry information. This tells that the content was interesting enough to some humans that they gave me their attention. I had given them something to mull over and their brain-fudge was stirred.
- Noise: Vague compliments. “Nice talk”, “Great work”, and the likes.
Another frustration I have with one-to-many style lectures is that the onus then generally falls on the audience to follow along with this vague monologue of the scholar. I have been suggested to take notes, increase attention span, and learn this skill. If I, as a fairly educated adult who is already interested in the subject matter, has trouble following along–then it must ultimately be alienating to a larger statistically significant proportion of the audience. My point here is that even if it is a learnable skill to be able to do this, the delivery must optimise for those who do not have this skill.
As someone who has been on either side of the stage, and has reviewed presentations from other people, it is absolutely fair to ask more of this scholarly person in organising their content so that it is more interesting and accessible. If it is not, you run the risk of being confined to this echo chamber where you are only communicating with the same kind of people, while simultaenously alienating those who share my troubles.
Nothing would make me happier than having you disagree with me (with breaks in between).