I feel like this lecturer is recognising that lecturers appear to add more value if they deliberately hinder students from accessing resources outside of their lectures. That's not a good thing.
All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.
If the students are reading ahead, they are better able to interact with the material ahead. That's a good thing.
The goal of the teacher is to help the students learn the subject matter: it's not right to think that they can only do that by paying close attention to your every entertaining word at the time you elect to say it.
I interpreted it as related to the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect): students think that they understand things when reading the slides, but sometimes they don't realize it. Therefore, making it obvious that they cannot understand the slide can sometimes help. At least in some institutions, a teacher's duty also includes protecting the students from themselves and their own ignorance, by forcing them sometimes to go to classes. They want to minimize failure rates. Also, it should be noted that good students can often learn by themselves (using other materials), but it's the bad students which require more effort.
> All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.
When I held the course for Infosec 101, I made sure that everyone on the course knew two things on the first day:
1) slideware was NOT the study material, they were complementing the lectures and acted only as memory aids
2) the exam was deliberately designed and scored so that it could not be passed by merely trying to learn from the slideware
That gave the students two options. Either attend the lectures and read up on some of the external course material, or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam. Most of them decided to attend. It probably helped that I was happily cultivating the legend of me being completely loose cannon and able to pull off pretty much any kind of stunt if it helped to make the material more memorable.
I found the suggestion that slides shouldn't make sense actually a very useful one. Slides shouldn't be confused with lecturer scripts, or a written guide to the subject. Those things have their place. However, a slide is a visual tool whose sole task is to increase the comprehension or impact of a talk or lecture.
Confusing the two roles is the main problem with PowerPoints today.
I feel like this lecturer is recognising that lecturers appear to add more value if they deliberately hinder students from accessing resources outside of their lectures. That's not a good thing.
All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.
If the students are reading ahead, they are better able to interact with the material ahead. That's a good thing.
The goal of the teacher is to help the students learn the subject matter: it's not right to think that they can only do that by paying close attention to your every entertaining word at the time you elect to say it.