The availability of all kinds of information on the Internet brings us to a new role for professors in university teaching. They become trusted intermediaries for knowledge acquisition.
As a professor, when I prepare new teaching materials for lectures, I naturally search the Internet for appropriate graphics, case studies, videos and other information. It is always amazing what material can be found there -- it ranges from incredibly well-prepared materials (e.g., Hans Rosling's TED Talks, which can be adopted almost unedited and in full beauty) to politically one-sided, colorized, or just plain wrong information. Using my knowledge and experience, I pick out the sound and credible media from this haystack and present it to my students in lecture.
The more external material I incorporate in this way, the more I create a playlist. In an earlier post, I did use the music analogy, and here it is similar. My students have a kind of basic trust in me as a lecturer, that the "music" I play will help them in their acquisition of knowledge.
*In the past* the lecturer was a "single source of truth", a "gatekeeper", who transferred exclusive information from the world of science into the teaching world. In the past, the only music I could hear was the music I played myself. In addition to this source, there was the library, also curated by a gatekeeper*, with further reading.
This world has changed. Similar to the transition from edited encyclopedias to unedited Wikipedia, the role of the former gatekeepers must change with it. We professors must drown out a growing background noise of dangerous half-knowledge as we attempt to share our knowledge. From all sides and even during lectures, our students are bombarded with unfiltered music, texts, and images on the very topics we want to teach, meticulously prepared and neatly supported with citations.
What do I have to do? Put my beautiful music against the ever louder noise and become louder myself, more pointed, more opinionated, more pointed, so that I can be heard? So that perhaps less balanced and less scientific? That can't be it.
Rather, I now see my task as compiling a playlist for students from the available music (= information from around the world). This playlist is curated, it can be followed, it can be liked, it brings my students closer to a topic -- in a natural process that is comprehensible to them and that is obviously gaining a foothold in other fields.
We just have to overcome the not invented here syndrome. That exists with professors, too, but that will be another post.
Translated with DeepL
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