I think the main purpose of classes, presentations and talks is as a vehicle for specific forms of academic signaling, relationship and prestige-building projects, but let’s set that aside and focus on learning.
You can likely get access to the speaker’s slides and references via a post-talk email, and you can probably also get a response to a few questions if need be. So the only pieces of information you’re truly missing out on when you zone out during a talk and can’t recover the thread are:
Anything the speakers says that goes beyond the contents of the slides
Any pedagogical value the speaker provides, such as calling your attention to specific parts of the slides or receiving questions before or after
Somewhere between 20 and 90 minutes of your life (and you can often either leave early or work on your laptop—possibly googling some of the background literature on the topic if you’re really interested—as a fallback)
If slides, poster or abstract are available in advance, you can pre-study for a talk you really want to follow. The extra benefit is that you’re less likely to zone out if you’re familiar with the contents of the talk, since confusion leads to checking out.
In a class context, of course, you can often just ask lots of naive questions because that’s the point of a class. If your teacher isn’t receptive to questions, then you just treat the class like a talk, which is easy mode since the syllabus and reading will generally be provided in advance.
Of course, it’s an extra burden to do all this pre- and post-study, but I think it is an unrealistic expectation that you’d be able to follow the details of cutting-edge research in a technical field that is not your own without an additional time investment beyond the talk itself.
Those are good points. Still, it would be great if listeners somehow could coordinate to interrupt the speaker as soon as the majority can’t follow anymore.
I think the main purpose of classes, presentations and talks is as a vehicle for specific forms of academic signaling, relationship and prestige-building projects, but let’s set that aside and focus on learning.
You can likely get access to the speaker’s slides and references via a post-talk email, and you can probably also get a response to a few questions if need be. So the only pieces of information you’re truly missing out on when you zone out during a talk and can’t recover the thread are:
Anything the speakers says that goes beyond the contents of the slides
Any pedagogical value the speaker provides, such as calling your attention to specific parts of the slides or receiving questions before or after
Somewhere between 20 and 90 minutes of your life (and you can often either leave early or work on your laptop—possibly googling some of the background literature on the topic if you’re really interested—as a fallback)
If slides, poster or abstract are available in advance, you can pre-study for a talk you really want to follow. The extra benefit is that you’re less likely to zone out if you’re familiar with the contents of the talk, since confusion leads to checking out.
In a class context, of course, you can often just ask lots of naive questions because that’s the point of a class. If your teacher isn’t receptive to questions, then you just treat the class like a talk, which is easy mode since the syllabus and reading will generally be provided in advance.
Of course, it’s an extra burden to do all this pre- and post-study, but I think it is an unrealistic expectation that you’d be able to follow the details of cutting-edge research in a technical field that is not your own without an additional time investment beyond the talk itself.
Those are good points. Still, it would be great if listeners somehow could coordinate to interrupt the speaker as soon as the majority can’t follow anymore.