Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 5

than turning up at the right time and place. More
than this, when a sector-wide rumour circulated
that all lectures would eventually be recorded, a
certain academic panic could be divined. I recall
one colleague threatening to hand in his notice
if all of his “performances” (his choice of word)
had to be committed to posterity. He might have
protested along the lines of civil liberties being
breached (and he might have forgotten, by the
way, that the work we do for an HEI remains
the institution’s intellectual property), but the
possibility of the proximity of anxiety should not
be dismissed. What did the protests say about a
lecturer’s confidence in his or her own abilities?
However sophisticated the completed video
package might be, it remains the encapsulation of a
moment – or a series of glued-together moments:
it is much more the capture of a lecture than the
capture of the lecture – than of the definitive
lecture. No one (to my knowledge) has ever
delivered the perfect, academically unassailable
classroom or lecture hall delivery of any given
subject. Proud though we might be of the session
that we have just taught, it is unlikely to have
been perfect. You stumbled over a couple of
words, perhaps. The microphone whistled. So why
would we worry about how that session looks and
sounds on a recording? Do we assume that our
students expect a picture quality worthy of Steven
Spielberg?
The footprint in the sand (or the mind) is the
learner’s to own and recognise. The learner can
look backwards, and with fortune favouring and
a following wind, might be able to pick out that
same footprint from among a slew of alternative
indentations.
But the footprint is also that of the educator.
Whether it is deeply embedded or merely a
scratching of the shore’s surface, the educator’s
presence has been marked. What the lecturer
records forms a tiny part of a vast story – the
manuscript of Higher Education itself – which has
been told over millennia, for at least six million
years, since we as a species started to learn how to
be ourselves. And there is one more thing.
Finally, I realise, in this moment of completing a
piece of work invited by Dr Crawford of this parish,
that these very words are my own lecture capture,
of sorts. They salute a moment of transition, from
one employment sector to another – or the next,
in my case. The mood, perhaps, should seem
elegiac; the coincidence of our approaching the
end of a year (as I write) should not pass without
a mention. These words are my footprints. Bad
weather will erase them, but nevertheless I will
have joined the conversation for a little while.
In November 2018 I submitted the manuscript of
my third (and final) academic monograph to the
publishing house that had commissioned me to
write it. Psychic River: Storms and Safe Ports in
Lifelong Learning uses the storm metaphor that
I mention above, at book length. Wherever the
conversation on lecture capture goes next, let us
bear in mind a similar comparison. It strikes me that
lecture capture is a useful tool, equivalent to our
leaving footprints in the sand. Should we consider
it surprising that education is not more often
evaluated in terms of the footprint left behind?
JADE
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