Welcome to the 19th edition of Smartspaces!

Exploring how we can learn more

👋 Hello and welcome to the latest Smartspaces newsletter!

I’ve been thinking all year about the best ways to learn new things. (yes, it’s hard (impossible?) to define what the ‘best’ way to learn given all the variables)

Still, this week, I had several conversations about university and education more broadly with people ranging from those considering dropping out of their courses to people considering going back for another degree. We’ve curated about 1,000 live talks and events on smrtspace.xyz and I’ve attended dozens and dozens over the last months. A large portion of these talks have been organised by universities. On top of all this, I came across an interesting & relevant op-ed in the Harvard Crimson (a student newspaper) titled, Are Lectures Obsolete?

In the article, Harvard student Julien Berman argues for ‘flipped classrooms’ that combine prerecorded background lectures with hands-on in-person classes. This makes a lot of sense to me (see our growing recordings section 🙂 ) but got me curious about how and why lectures became so prominent as the default forms of teaching in higher education.

The history is actually pretty interesting! (see the expanded tl;dr at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in the cliff notes) — but basically, it’s just an ~1,000 year old process, caused by economic and technological limitations that has seen (relatively) minimal innovation.

So what does it all mean?

While lectures are outdated and in desperate need of some revamping, I think for many learners, especially in specific subjects and frequencies, it seems there are still clear benefits. Interestingly, lots of my ‘research’ led to comments on our dwindling attention spans as a core reason why lectures are losing value.

This is particularly interesting as it coincides with the phenomenon (which frankly, makes no sense to me) of surging popularity for video-versions of (long-form) podcasts. Are lectures just uniquely boring? Are listeners not paying full attention to these entertainment podcasts? Does education in general need a rebrand?

Let us know what you think! 🎒 

What did I miss last week?

Catch up with recordings of last week’s top events at your own pace!

Creative Maladjustment and the Climate Crisis - with Kumi Naidoo ⭐️

RAG Time! Evaluate RAG with LLM Evals and Benchmarking - with Mikyo King & Amber Rogers

DBOS: A Database-oriented Operating System - with Michael Stonebraker

Reducing cancer risk through nutrition - by the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University

Making technology to make music - with Andrew McPherson

Looking for something else? 👉 100s of recordings in our Full recordings database 

Next week’s top 3 events 🌟 
_{The best events and why they matter!}