teach talks

Gave a talk today at lab for the collaboration meeting. This is always a good experience: giving talks forces you to learn the subject well and then articulate it in a meaningful way to an audience. A very useful skill that is almost absent in our K-16 education. I think the key reason is: there is not enough time to have everyone in a class stand up front and spout off on their personal topic of choice. But technology offers an easy workaround: videotape the talks and then assign watching others' for homework. That way, you know that you're going to have an audience. And it saves the class time of sitting through all the presentations. All you need is a camcorder, digital editing software, and a website to upload the videos to. This must be the future of teaching. Public speaking is too important to ignore this kind of medium.