Lecture 1.1.0 - Are You Really Listening?
Lecture
Watch or listen to the following lecture and take notes. You are going to do a Quiz to show that you are paying attention to the lecture.
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Lesson #1: Active Listening. Think about this: What percentage of your daily waking hours do you spend just listening? 10%? 50%? 80%?
Listening to what? Are you listening to music? to the radio? to your friends talking? to the teacher talking and lecturing? Listening to your fellow students responding in class?
We listen a lot. We spend a lot of time listening.
Why do we listen? Well, to obtain information, to learn, to understand, to socialize with our friends, to be entertained.
Research has shown that we remember less than half of what we hear. Somewhere between 25 to 50 % of what we hear we don't remember and that can be a real handicap if you're a student.
Two of the main senses, hearing and seeing, are wired into what we call our learning style. So some of us learn by what we listen to and remember a lot of what we hear. Some of us are visual learners, we remember what we see.
For example, I'm a visual learner. When I attended lectures as a student I was taking notes like crazy. I was drawing pictures, diagrams. This helped me to remember. When I got back to my room I would take my pictures and my notes and I would write them out as elaborate paragraphs. So by taking in information and by putting it down and unpacking it, I learned that way.
So what is the problem with listening? Well the problem with listening to lectures in classrooms is we get bored, we get distracted. We lose our interest.
You know there was a time before printed books were available, students learned just by listening. For example, in ancient Rome and Greece, even in China, for thousands of years before writing became popular or even available, people learned by listening to elders, to teachers. One of the most famous was Socrates, a Greek philosopher, who gathered his students around their doors in the forum under trees and he talked and they listened. And he asked questions and they asked questions. And listening and speaking was the way to learn.
Well, in our first lecture, we're going to listen to a number of speakers talking between 5 I think the longest speech will be about 12 minutes long. And we're going to point out, I'm going to point out, what makes those speeches interesting to listen to and why will we remember what they say?
So, you're going to go to a little quiz right now just as a kind of a warm up. A quiz that will give me an idea of how prepared you are to engage in active listening.