(This blog article is to be polished further, this is version 0.0)
The audience are anxiously waiting for the commencement of the Nobel laureate's lecture at IISc. The lecture finally begins and everyone is captivated to see how the speaker introduces the topic. The first five minutes of the talk --any talk for that matter-- receives the most attention from the audience (thanks to our minuscule attention span). We keep our spine erect and chin up with our eyes focused on the PowerPoint slides, evaluating the oratory skills of the speaker coupled with the analysis of his body language and his accent. We wouldn't like it if the person next seat was meddling with his PDA, let alone the phone ringing. I always wished there was a lecture-sensing-technology on our mobile which would put all the mobiles on silent mode (more particularly in a movie theatre) and another leap in engineering namely, boring-lecture-sensing-technology which would make all the mobiles ring in unison once the lecture gets buggingly boring - Man I have high hopes from the 2010 technology, but how I wish!!!!!!.
I normally occupy the last seat in a lecture (More so when the lecture is at IISc and particularly when it is given by a prof from IISc, and am all the more particular about my love for the last seat if it is Prof._____________________, have left blank for us to fill our fav prof's name).
As I sip the tea and munch the biscuits and listen to the speaker, the first five to ten minutes, I am spinerect-chinup-eyefocused and there is Nil-head-movement. But 15 minutes into the talk, I feel I am lost (damn! the speaker neither feels nor senses the reception quotient of his audience.). I open up my mobile phone, thanking that I can atleast use my mobile phone contrary to what I wished at the beginning of the lecture quoting some xy-sensing-technology. I start smsing, playing, browsing or taking the picture of the speaker (as though I will never get another chance to attend his lecture again in my life).
Rajeev would then start speaking to his friend sitting next to him cracking a joke, Anjaneyulu with a dish-antenna spectacles would be discussing his ideas with the person sitting next to him, flaunting that he is the only one who is understanding the lecture. Miss. Stella would turn around and see whether people are listening or looking at the roof sipping the free tea with biscuits, she would then giggle and feel happy that she isn't the only one not understanding.
At this stage of the talk the auditory cortex of our audience would get completely shut and their visual cortex will get hyperactive. This is the situation when, if someone takes a snapshot from the stage, of the entire audience (the way Deepika Padukone takes the panorama shot of her audience in a TV ad) , one would wonder after seeing the photo whether there was anyone at all on the stage presenting something.
Cut the Crap, Is there a possibility of we tracking the head movement of our audience and rating the captivation quotient (CQ: how well is our speaker keeping our audience captivated) of our audience? Can this be done live? With a camera kept on the stage which would continuously monitor the head movement of the audience and finally plot the captivation quotient Vs Time?
Let us use a 10 point scale, if there is absolutely no head movement then the captivation quotient is 0, if there is a whole lot of head movement then the captivation quotient is 10.
If the talk is for an hour's duration, if we could plot and see the captivation quotient Vs time, this would be a great yard-stick to measure the reachability of the talk...
Simply stated:
If there is a lot of head movement, then that indicates restlessness and that would be a result of a boring lecture. If there is no head movement, then that signifies that everyone is concentrating, which means that the lecture has captivated the interest of the audience.
Simply stated:
If there is a lot of head movement, then that indicates restlessness and that would be a result of a boring lecture. If there is no head movement, then that signifies that everyone is concentrating, which means that the lecture has captivated the interest of the audience.
Any ideas? You think the hypothesis that "The interest of audience in the content of the talk is correlated to their head movement" is right?
Yes i feel that if the people are nodding there heads and are sitting upright - They are extremely interested in the lecture .... The overall idea is good . I think this can be implemented in auditoriums and seminar halls!! But one more precaution to be taken is that the people should not know that they are being watched or their movements are being watched , if they know that they may act artificailly :)!!!! We can also decide whom we can call again some other time to give a lecture
ReplyDeleteVivek thats a nice input...
ReplyDeletebtw, am not sure whether you got an important point here.
A lot of haphazard head movement implies that the audience are not interested. Lesser the head movement, better is the reception of the lecture.
What if the lecture is very convincing and you are nodding to accede to a point which the lecturer just made? In my opinion, CQ is directly related to the number of biscuits left in the tray :P [assuming the audience is allowed to grab a bite whenever they want]
ReplyDeleteI completely disagree ....
ReplyDelete1. People sleep during lectures and I believe this is not a very accurate method. I personally prefer sleeping rather than talk and waste my energy.
2. I tend to show lot of enthusiasm by speaking to neighbors if the lecture is interesting. The metabolism rate is high if the lecture is good, but if the present method is used it would show otherwise.
This is not just the case with me.
To Sudarshan : Remember your classes ? Everyone loved it and the class never used to be silent when you taught.
The graph would be something like a bell curve. Too less or too much of activity would probably imply a bad lecture. It certainly is not linear.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteif this were the case 99% of lectures would be eliminated in PESIT, the other 1% being yours of course :P
ReplyDeletei like ur interpretation of things sudarshan ;)
ReplyDeletebut if i found a lecture interesting, i would probably shrink my eyes(n restrict d head movements!) n try to concentrate harder so that i wouldn't miss any important parts.
oh but yes! there are some enthusiastic ppl who nod their heads like it would pop-out any minute! not all do it though..
so ur hypothesis may be partially rite.
P.s:- there hav been times wen i hav pretended to be interested in a lecture by nodding my head cuz d speaker was looking at me ;)
hey eveyrbody... i think i have failed in explaining things
ReplyDeleteI meant the following:
if there is a lot of head movement, then that indicates restlessness and hence the lecture is boring
if there is no head movement, then everyone is concentrating, which means the lecture has captivated the audience's interest
What if ppl r sleeping, even then their head movement would be almost NIL. may be position change of the audience or eye movement or eye lid :P variation. or may be both head and eye :D
ReplyDeleteJust trying to put some weird ideas of mine too :D
I didn't understand how exactly is CQ related to head movement. You begin the argument by stating that at the beginning of the lecture, the audience keeps its head still. And as the lecture proceeds, audience loses interest and hence moves its head either to meddle with the phone or to talk to/ gawk at neighbors. This mean CQ is inversely proportional to head movement. But in the end you say that CQ is directly proportional to head movement.
ReplyDeleteThis also brings up a point as to how to measure attention - if someone nods his head or someone doesn't. For instance, if I am feeling bored of the lecture I might do two things -
1. Constantly stare at a far away point or my cell phone.
2. Nod at regular intervals if I know the lecturer and he/she expects me to listen.
Hence head movement may not be a valid criteria. May be if we have a high resolution camera we instead capture each person's gaze, measure line of sight and by the pupil's movement determine if the person is listening to the lecture or merely staring at the lecturer. But this again might be inaccurate.
I think your captivation quotient need to be other way round.
ReplyDeleteIf higher CQ implies interesting lecture, then no head movement should have 10 and not 0. Thats the root of the confusion.
From what I've observed so far, People tend to get relaxed as the lecture proceeds.
ReplyDeleteI'll assume two cases, one with a boring lecture and the other with an interesting one. The main job is to plot CQ versus time.
Case 1: Boring!
Initially, "audiences" will be in the spine erect position. Gradually, people tend to relax. So, curvature of the spine increases.
Suggestion: Fix a camera on the stage as well as on the the direction perpendicular to the seats. That way, we can analyze the head-movement, spine-curvature and probably look for "flashes of light" (mobiles) on the side-cam and stage-cam.
Case 2: Interesting!
Throughout the lecture, the change in the posture of the person is negligible. This includes the curvature of spine and head movement.
Conclusion (crude):
Assuming least CQ for most interesting lectures,
CQ = k * (change in spine curvature of ALL audiences) * (change in position of head for ALL audiences) * (number of mobile light flashes that are detected on side-cam)
where k -> proportionality constant.
And I'm pretty sure that the reader's spine curvature will be quite high after reading through this post.:P
I dont think this direct correlation between head movement and captivity quotient captures accurately the receptivity of a lecture. There are a lot of other parameters involved. And then there is the human factor, how an individual reacts when he is enthusiastic, when he is bored...for example, I ll become animated when something interests me, but someone else might get animated when distracted and bored...which differs, and depends on the individual.
ReplyDeletesay all of us dont want to listen to some lecture just keeping nodding ur head for full 5 mins.. n the beeper goes off... must be deafening enough that the audience along with the speaker run away. and you must include a biometric device that does not allow the speaker to hamper with this absolutely student friendly device!! :P this is solely keeping in mind the pesit lecturers!! no offence meant sudarshan!! :) but yeah!!
ReplyDelete