Inaugural action: Reading Lessons – From Papyrus to ChatGPT

On 20th March, I delivered my inaugural lecture at the University of Lincoln. I can’t say that I was massively looking forward to it, but in the end I really enjoyed it. The Lincoln Institute for Advanced Studies organises, records and shares the lectures on their website (see here for the full list). You can watch mine below.

Here’s what I had said I’d talk about before the event:

In this lecture Jamie will argue that we need to rethink our relationship with reading. He suggests that despite its fundamental importance, reading is a neglected skill in post-secondary education. Due to its ubiquity and the fact that most of us were long since taught how to read, it is easy to forget that it is an ability that has to be learned and cultivated throughout life. This has broader social implications for our ability to engage productively with information proliferation, misinformation and ‘fake news’. In this lecture, he will introduce a little-known cast of teachers from Late Antiquity who grappled with similar challenges and consider how their approaches to the teaching of reading might shed an interesting light on modern-day pedagogies.

And here’s what actually happened:

Anyone who would like to access the slides can do so here: