Oral Communication

YouTube Colloquium...
I have been talking with a number of colleagues recently about the importance of oral-communication skills and how they are supported and taught (or not, as the case may be). Various commentators have noted that in a knowledge and service economy, lack of articulacy puts people at a disadvantage in terms of employability. Communication and narrative skills seem to be going up the agenda in education. Cambridge now gets its Ph.D. students in science to undertake two minute public expositions of complex ideas, as part of its public understanding of science remit, fulfilling some of its RCUK Joint Skills Statement obligations for postgraduates.[1]

We have specific disciplines where the need for oral communication is made explicit (mooting in law for instance, 'pieces to camera' in Journalism and TV Production). We also have research expertise in specific areas. For instance, Prof. Bernie Carter in the Department of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire is researching the role of narrative enquiry in diagnostic encounters between patients and medical professionals, drawing on insights from professional storytellers. On the whole though, I suspect that students are not well prepared for all the ways in which they need to communicate orally: seminars, break-out sessions, presentations, interviews etc. There is also evidence in the literature that 'giving a presentation' is one of the least favourite forms of assessment, though students grudgingly recognize its value afterwards. I was wondering if we could highlight oral-communication skills and make them more fun by harnessing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies.

Could we, as part of the undergraduate research journal Diffusion for instance, invite students to submit an oral presentation of their research on YouTube? Keep it short, make it a competition, with a prize. The best candidates get to present live to an invited audience, who can ask questions, with a further award. This achieves a number of objectives. Whilst our students are perhaps unfamiliar with debating societies, YouTube is a paradigm they understand, with very low barriers to entry. It could link research with its public communication and dissemination aspects, which would prepare students well for giving papers at conferences, surviving their viva or a job interview. Getting them to pitch it to an informed public audience would get them thinking about target audiences and the need for clear exposition of complex ideas. It might also get them thinking about the ways formal academic discourse can sometimes cloud understanding.

This is only one approach. What about updating the prize essay for the ‘Google Generation’ and getting students to submit both written and/or oral entries? In 1749 the Academy of Dijon set a prize essay, advertised in the Mercure de France: ‘Do the Sciences and the Arts contribute to the corrupting or the or to improving morals?’ Upon seeing the advertisement in the paper, the eventual winner, Rousseau, noted ‘I saw another universe and became another man’.

[1] Swain, H., ‘Spice up your science’, The Guardian, Education, Tuesday 19 February 2008, 12. http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/postgraduate/story/0,,2257835,00.html Accessed 3 July 2008.