Teach Naked? Interaction is the key!

Seth Reeves

As I searched on the Chronicles of Education website trying to find an interesting topic for this blog, I came across a video that said, “A Professor’s Plea: Try Teaching Naked.” This immediately grabbed my attention because it just sounded so silly. After watching the video I understood the professor’s point. He said he believes that computers are getting in the way of interaction at a university. So other professors should try to “teach naked” without using their beloved computers.

This made a lot of sense to me. His reasoning was that students pay all this money to come to a university, and are actually living on that campus. However, with so many computers being involved with teaching that it takes away from the experience that the students are paying for. If they didn’t care about the experience and interaction part of college then they could just take courses online. So what this professor does is use a podcast to teach all of the more “boring” stuff, and have students listen to it on their own, and then come class time, students can ask questions , and have time to do more interactive learning. Now, if for some reason students needed to use their computers in class, they are allowed to, but the goal is to get back into interactive teaching, and this is a great way to do that.

I believe this is a great idea. I could really learn more by having classes like this and my college experience would be a lot more fun. Granted, I know that the world is changing, and we are in a technology age, but I also can see how that would take away from the interaction part of learning which is so very important. Interaction makes learning a lot more fun and exciting. I think it would be a good idea that other universities try this technique, and see how their students react. They may be surprised to find a higher attendance and overall higher grades.