The public lecture

Tonight I went to a talk by an ex OU colleague, Nigel Warburton. Nigel does the tremendously popular Philosophy Bites podcasts and writes very good books on philosophy. His topic tonight was philosophy as dialogue, in which he argued against the stereotype of the philosopher as lone thinker, sitting in isolation.
I like a public lecture, there's such a great tradition of them, and as someone who bangs on about open education, this is it in its original form. My only complaint is that universities aren't very good at advertising them. I found out about this by a chance tweet. There were no signs up, the receptionist didn't know anything about it, it wasn't listed in any of the 'What's on in Cardiff" listings etc. Nigel's talk was very accessible, so I'm sure a bigger audience would have been interested. I think unis need to be better at this public engagement.