Jeffrey R. Young’s Chronicle article, “Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom,” has apparently struck a nerve among professors, particularly those who are critical of educational technology. As I write this, the article has 59 comments on the Chronicle site, which is far more than most articles receive. Even the graph [...]
Continuing my reports from the contributed paper session on teaching with clickers I helped coordinate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January… “Using Prediction and Classroom Voting via Clickers to Address Students’ Overreliance on the Representativeness Heuristic,” Tami Dashley, University of Texas-El Paso [Slides] Tami Dashley is a graduate student in math education and [...]
The summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) wraps up in Portland, Oregon, today. There were several talks on teaching physics with clickers at the meeting, including one by Ian Beatty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro physics education research group. Ian was the subject of my first podcast interview, [...]
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported (briefly) on a new survey from CDW, a “leading provider of technology products and services for business, government, and education,” indicating some differences in how faculty and IT staff view the role of technology in higher education. Here’s what caught my eye from the Chronicle story: “The most [...]
The latest issue of the American Mathematical Society’s Notices includes an essay by Steven Zucker [PDF], a mathematician at Johns Hopkins University. In the essay Zucker argues that student course evaluations are not appropriate for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching and that the use of “surveys” to do so “pushes us to dumb down our [...]
Over on the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching blog, my Vanderbilt colleague Isabel Gauthier, professor of psychology, has shared her experiences asking her students to write their own clicker questions. I met with Isabel a few years ago and briefly discussed ways to use clickers in her courses, and she’s really taken the technology (and [...]
More thoughts on Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age… In Chapter 2, Shirky described the means by which people are now able to pool their cognitive surplus for the greater good, focusing on many of the same social media tools described by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail [...]
Welcome to my home page. I’m Derek Bruff, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I’m also acting director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics. The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Vanderbilt University.
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