Giving lectures on tv

The Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) recently launched a new initiative involving several Danish universities called “The Danes’ Academy” (“Danskernes Akademi”). The project involves broadcasting short university lectures on daytime TV on the national channel DR2.

DR is inspired by for instance BBC’s The Open University or Ted.com and has created a website where all lectures can be viewed and discussed.

I have been involved in filming two 20-25 minutes lectures which were broadcast a couple of days ago. In both of the lectures I talk about social network sites and my own research on youth and new media. In the first lecture I focus mainly on defining SNS and in the second I highlight central concepts and research results explaining the popularity of the phenomenon. Both lectures can be viewed here (they are in Danish, though).

I like the idea of communicating research results in this manner (it’s nice with more than 20 seconds of airtime) and I plan to record more talks when I have handed in the dissertation.