Hi Guys, I'm Patrick Farrell, and I'm the
instructor for this hybrid version of "Introduction
to Linguistics" that I've been working on
for a couple of years with Kristen Greer,
a Ph.D. candidate.There are a few key ideas
behind the structure of this course that I
want to focus on in this brief orientation.
The first is something that my daughter Julia
highlighted for me when she decided to return
to college a few years ago and started taking
general education courses at Sac City.
She said, "Dad, why should I spend money on
school, when I can find everything that's
in the lectures and textbooks on the internet
for free?"
And, I realized, as you probably have too,
that with YouTube and Wikipedia and the vast
set of scholarly publications that are now
in open-access repositories, almost all shared
human knowledge is now available to anyone
with a smart phone or a computer and an internet
connection.
Just as I learned how to do a brake job on
my car and replace the water heater in my
house by watching how-to videos on YouTube,
I can also learn all about how English and
other languages work and can even learn how
to discover new things about languages in
the same way that linguists have done through
investigative research with people, written
records, and electronic data.
Sitting in a lecture hall and listening to
a professor talk about something that's in
the publicly available record of knowledge
is not an efficient learning strategy.
And paying more than $100 for a textbook to
get the same thing in print is kind of crazy.
So, what I explained to her was that there
are two main reasons for her to attend college
courses.
One is to get a degree that certifies attainment
of a certain level of education and qualifies
her to proceed further in her career.
The other is to be part of a community of
people that's defined by a shared journey
of learning and to be engaged because of this
in the kinds of conversations that foster
inquiry and discovery.
Another of my daughters, herself a highly
successful UC graduate, just recently reminded
me that she remembers almost nothing about
the content of lectures and readings from
her college career.
What she still remembers vividly, however,
are the lessons she learned in interactions
with students and teachers and creative team
projects in which she was able to teach other
people about something she had learned.
She says that you learn the most by doing
things that develop skills and teaching others.
