Not a big fan of the livestreamed class, but I did one anyway yesterday.

I don’t really care for the livestream as there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way of teaching here.

Typically I could do a 10 to 15 minute video on a reading and be fine with it. But the livestream is more like a traditional classroom. You could have 2 or 3 hours and not get through half the readings.

The goal, of course, is not to just get through the readings but to make sure the students understand the readings and can do something with them. The “something they do” should be a bit more than “get them” or “explain them back to you.” What we want them to do is incorporate them into a third, different perspective, something that has been created out of the teacher the reading and the position they bring to it from their lives.

The livestream allows for that but the interaction isn’t really there. I think I get better student interaction from the asynchronous videos. There they can write a comment about it to me privately and we can discuss it. That might limit what the other students can get out of the exchange, but I often ask students to post their questions on the Discord or other discussion board in order to answer it there for the whole class.

A live stream also must be broken up to be useful later. Haven’t done that yet, but not really sure how to do it because of how the stream turned out. If I just make some shorter videos, it might be better.

Maybe the livestream is like office hours? Hang out, publicly think and talk, see who comes by?

An archive of thinking out loud about the readings with some engagement and some interlocutors might be good.

Tomorrow I plan to make a bunch of asynchronous videos so we’ll see how they compare.