I agree that everyone in the classroom has rights.

I would not want to be a student in a university controlled by individuals who would deny as ridiculous the argument that everyone in the classroom has natural rights.

Ridiculousness aside, the base fact is that students now want the value of recording lectures to improve their knowledge retention and overall studies, as well as to assist with certain forms of learning difficulty or disability, and that is not going to change.
This is a change in the job lecturers do that is equivalent to the change from chalk boards to visualisers to computers & projectors, and like that change it is something lecturers are going to have to accept as the way they do their job.

The best ways to manage this if staff are worried about some of the things they are saying are for the institution to control the recording (most students I’m sure would prefer to be handed a good quality recording than have to do it themselves anyway), and for the lecturer to think about their content more carefully (and if there are things they wouldn’t want to be misinterpreted on or taken out of context, be very careful about what they say – which they should really be doing anyway).

It’s not going away, it’s only going to become more prolific, so lets embrace it as the good learning tool that it is(and most of the good lecturers I’ve worked with have already done so) and use it to develop innovative and exciting courses for our students.

One might equally ask how anyone on the planet could deny that everyone in the room has rights, and not just the people who want to make a electronic recordings.

A different version of the scenario could flow like this:

Leslie would get more out of the lecture if Robin did not always ask questions that Leslie does not understand.

Therefore, no one could deny that Leslie has the natural right to force Robin to drink a fatal dose of hemlock.

(Possibly, Leslie could win an award from the Board for raising the staff/student ratio.)

If Leslie’s desires take precedence over everyone else’s rights, does that precedence rescind all other rights?

Like it or not, and I don’t say I do, you’re in a market (you are!) in which the “customers” (no, I don’t like it either …) are stumping up £9000 per year, more often than not to pay for third rate tuition in third rate institutions with third rate infrastructure. This can persist only for so long a the protected oligoply that is the current HE sector is allowed to exist.

With the introduction of “top up” tuition fees (which are, in reality, used to subsidise, to an indefensible degree, the pursuit of RAE rankings; and any analysis I’ve seen of time allocation surveys v. institutional income confirms this) the genie was released from the bottle and can never go back. A free market will inevitably follow, for no political party will protect the priveleged position of poorly performing institutions/departments/academics inherent in the status quo.

Already, private providers, including FTSE 100 publishing companies and top US universities, are sniffing around for opportunities to turn a profit. At £9000 a pop, the opportunities a certainly there; I’ve seen the sums, I’ve done my own.

Sordid? It surely is, but none of it was of my doing, quite the reverse.

In such a world, like it or not, the customer, if not king, is at least likely to demand pedagogical value for the hefty financial charges they incur. This will include the right to exploit the benefits of new digital tools. Talk and chalk should have died years ago.

And as a PS, Anna, did you look at the comments under your Chronicle link? Overwhelmingly, the academics who responded to this were of the view, supported by experience and evidence, that the benefits of allowing recordings are well worthwhile. How on earth anyone can deny the benefits a keen student will obtain from being able to re-listen to the day’s lecture material on the journey home is beyond me. That, to me, is simply the point.

Ironically, smart users are not essential to their operation. By hypothesis, these devices will propel their users beyond the levels predicted by the Peter Principle, into tiers of management and control that create consequent exposure of the rest of society to great risk. The people who have risen to their natural level of incompetence will be guided by people who are beyond incompetent.

Some in the world are happier placing professional trust in people who are able to reason in the absence of technical aids than in people who can reason only when supported by prosthetic intelligence.

“If a lecturer is so uncomfortable as to reject being recorded in this way, one really has to question their career choice.”

One might also suggest that individuals franchised in university boardrooms who question the career choice of an academic who wishes to preserve a right to retain control over the use of her or his own voice or image, or to protect the equal rights of students, should, in questioning that career choice, also question their own: they should ask whether the style of micro-management entailed by forcing recordings in the classrooms from the level of the boardroom is more constructively aligned with what is traditionally associated with canine obedience schools (where the classroom probably is the boardroom), or with military boot-camps (with a tremendous hierarchical distance between the two rooms, and affording as many chances for power-display as there are rank differences), since both of those sorts of schools identify demonstration of reflexive obedience as a primary measure of success, than aligned with the sound governance of university level educational and research institutions.

It seems that a category error must have been responsible for the admission of people with the title “manager” into the governance of any university in the first place.

I’ve looked into students’ eyes and I’ve flat-out lied to them. I’ve told them stuff that simply wasn’t true. I’ve manipulated the truth and done so with a convincing conviction. But this is all part of lecturing … you can’t tell first years the ‘truth’ about why s orbitals are spherical and p orbitals dumb-bell shaped, for example, because they won’t understand it until third-year. You don’t tell them the exact history of a discovery but the ‘scientists’ version of history’ we use to simplify the mess it actually was and show the connections to their course.

If these ‘discussions’ were taken out of context I, quite probably, would look a fool. But it wouldn’t change the fact that I had to lie to students to achieve an end-goal