ABSTRACT
In former times, as our more senior colleagues sometimes remind us, the matter of ‘tools in the lecture room’ was quite straightforward. There were really only two: talk and chalk! Or, to be more accurate, chalk and blackboards. Every classroom had a blackboard. In many cases, every lecture theatre had one or more bigger blackboard—usually of the ‘roller’ variety, just about enough for a lecturer to write upon it for a whole hour without needing to rub anything out. Nowadays in the developed world, blackboards are becoming a something of a rarity, but they still have their champions. For example, the Times Higher Education Supplement in January 2002 reported hot debate at high-level strategy meetings at Oxford University about the replacement of blackboards by whiteboards in the lecture rooms of the associated Natural History Museum. Apparently the mathematicians who teach there argued that ‘chalk has just the right edge on it to allow them to write at the correct speed to explain to students. Marker pens that glide across are considered too fast’ (THES, Diary, 18 January 2002, p13).
