- Corona , The University
- 20/04/2020
Life lessons from corona disproved in first online lecture Studium Generale
Wednesday afternoon, Studium Generale will welcome its first online guest during these corona times: philosopher Menno de Bree. Via the livestream on Facebook and YouTube, he will discuss all the well-intentioned life lessons that we hear all the time during this crisis, but which, in his opinion, don’t hold water.
Offline, face-to-face and interactive, surrounded by an interested audience. If these are indispensable ingredients in just about everything you normally do, then during crisis times - depending on non-physical alternatives - it’s quite the switch, Studium Generale (SG) agrees. When the campus closed a few weeks ago, the entire spring program was forcibly formatted and re-examined - now using ‘virtual glasses’.
SG director Lucas Asselbergs confesses that he would have liked to have set up a complete online offer faster, "but it was just a real quest: where is our core, what is our added value?" Because, he already wondered aloud a few weeks ago: of course you can offer lectures online, "but how would that be of more value than a TEDtalk?"
As his office is used to preparing a program for a whole quartile and introducing it in one go, SG is now working about two to three weeks ahead. The aim is to provide an online program every week for the coming period, in which the topics, speakers, artists and form may vary.
Radio program
On its site SG also offers ‘One minute tips’, columns, longgreads, mini lectures, quizzes and podcasts; Furthermore, the office regularly let’s its voice be heard on the TU/e Community Radio, recently including a theme evening about hip-hop and rap, and (coming Thursday) a program about the Beatles, fifty years after the band's breakup.
Wednesday will be the first live online lecture with philosopher Menno de Bree (in English), which will be broadcast via Facebook and YouTube. Viewers can ask questions via the corresponding chat. Asselbergs: “In the beginning I had a hard time believing that such a lecture via a screen would be interesting. You look at something very 'flat', something that is far away, without the atmosphere and entourage of a hall. But around me I see that all kinds of events appeal to people, that they ‘meet’ online and still enjoy that something happens.”
Read on below the photo.
Dreaming of extra guests
The SG director is curious whether the new format will also attract a different audience. “Of the audience in the Blauwe Zaal usually seventy, eighty percent are students, supplemented with some visitors from Eindhoven city and TU/e employees. Now people can join from far and wide.” The other way around, now that physical distance no longer plays a significant role, other potential guests might show up. Although some dreams will probably stay dreams, according to Asselbergs: "For example, I would very much like to invite Yuval Harari (the Israeli historian and futurologist, ed.) - but that is priceless.”
Asselbergs takes into account that the much-discussed 'new normal' will still be (partly) in effect after the summer holidays, that SG will mainly be active online and “that from September on, there will still be a restricted use of halls. Fortunately, the Blauwe Zaal is a large room in which quite a lot is possible, possibly with programs for a smaller audience.” He also hopes that the World Press Photo exhibition, which would start in the last week of August this year, can continue. "I believe it should be possible to keep the required distance of one and a half meters."
USE points
After consultating Dean Lex Lemmens of the Bachelor College, Studium Generale has decided to drop the USE points for this quartile. Students who want to graduate this summer are thus exempted from the compulsory five SG-USE points. This, according to Asselbergs “for the simple reason that if you want to organize lectures in which you want to be able to gauge the presence of people, you need an exam or exam-like structure. That is also possible, but with all kinds of legal restrictions. In our view, this would make the cure worse than the disease. But if all this is still going on in the fall, we will think of a solution.”
Signing up for the lecture "Life lessons and other nonsense" by Menno van Bree (Wednesday April 22nd, 12.45 pm) is not obligatory, but it is possible. If you do, you will receive a reminder by email shortly before the lecture.
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