Capturing Peter Landin?
Perhaps this post is a bit of self-indulgence as its link to e-learning might seem a little convoluted and self-involved but I noticed that Peter Landin’s Obituary has been published in the Guardian today. Having been a student in the Department of Computer Science at what was then Queen Mary and Westfield College in the early ’90s, I am lucky enough to have encountered him, however I was never taught by him. My husband, however, who is even older than me, was taught as an undergraduate by Peter and found him to be truly inspirational. He can still wax lyrical about the types of subject that Peter taught (abstract data types in particular) but more importantly, the way he taught them. Apparently he had wonderfully elegant ways of describing the real nitty gritty concepts of Computer Science. My husband also does an interesting impersonation of Peter’s massively enthusiastic blackboard technique (that’s your original blackboard, not the Blackboard I spend most of my time with now). Not only that but Peter also provided the most wonderfully constructed handwritten notes to accompany the lecture.
So now for the perhaps convoluted e-learning take on this post to make it more relevant to where it’s being posted…attending a Peter Landin lecture sounds like a real experience. Enough of an experience that someone, over 20 years later, can remember it in quite a lot of detail. Peter’s lectures, however, sound like they were quite…well…traditional…in their format. The effectiveness of the traditional lecture in higher education has become a topic of debate (Diana Laurillard’s "Rethinking University Teaching" for example) and the recording of lectures has become an area of great interest recently. Indeed we’re piloting our own lecture capture system in parts of QM (now Queen Mary, University of London by the way). With this in my mind, I was talking to my husband about what it would have been like if Peter’s lectures could have been recorded. This raised some interesting issues. Clearly he thought it would be wonderful to be able to revisit the lectures now…perhaps an element of nostalgia? Given Peter’s standing in the Computer Science community, they would also be interesting as historical documents. From my perspective, as someone who was not taught by Peter Landin and who struggled with some of the areas of Computer Science that he taught, I wonder if having access to a recording of his lectures would have helped me even without having been there. His elegance of description might have been just what I needed.
However, would Peter’s lectures have been different had he known they were being recorded? Would he ever have allowed himself to be recorded? Would students have turned up to the lectures had they known that the recordings would be available? The last question is one that is raised a lot in the context of lecture recording. My husband says that Peter’s lectures were just full of energy and therefore very engaging, if not tremendously interactive. This is something that it’s hard to imagine that you can experience through a Flash movie…you really had to be there for the full effect. There is some evidence that students do understand this and therefore lecture recording may not necessarily have a detrimental effect on attendance. (see for instance the Executive Summary on an Australian project called "The Impact of Web-Based Lecture Technologies on Current and Future Practices in Learning and Teaching").
To finish…I’m sure there’s lots of people who have anecdotes about Peter and I have one, albeit second hand. At the time, Peter did not have a computer in his office and was being encouraged to learn a bit about the UNIX operating system. Someone in one of the open plan departmental labs was trying to teach him some UNIX commands and after a while his voice rang out across the lab declaring that "the semantics were a bit ropey"
Well quite.
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