Eric Tremblay recently blogged about his plans to have his students write clicker questions for him to use during class.  He’s not lazy; he wants his students to think about the material in his course and possible misunderstandings of that material.  Student questions will be posted in a class forum, and he’ll select one or more each week to use in class.  Students earn participation credit for posting questions and triple credit when their questions are the ones selected.

Having students write exam questions as a way of preparing them to take exams is a time-honored teaching strategy, but I have only lately heard of instructors like Eric having students craft clicker questions as a way to have them engage with course material.  Writing clicker questions is difficult, but that’s due in part to the difficulty of predicting student misunderstandings, which is required for constructing good wrong answer choices.  I wonder if students might be better able to identify potential misunderstandings since they are not experts in their fields and are thus closer, in a sense, to those misunderstandings.

This idea of having students write clicker questions came up a few times at the recent Joint Mathematics Meetings I attended.  Have you tried this?  I would be interested in hearing how this plays out.

Here’s a nice follow-up to my previous post about backchannel use during live performances.  Over at Abilene Christian University, where all the students (more or less) have iPhones, a group of students were given extra credit for watching the recent State of the Union address by US President Barack Obama.  However, they didn’t just watch it; they responded to clicker questions asked by their instructor on-the-fly during the speech.  The students used their iPhones to respond to these questions, but any kind of classroom response system would do the trick for something like this.  This seems like a great way to use some student perspective questions to help students engage more meaningfully with a live broadcast of this nature. (You may recall that I mentioned some universities that did something similar during the 2008 presidential debates.)

ACU also thought ahead to video the evening!

I just had to share this recent story from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog: “University Dance Group Uses Twitter, Wii for Latest Performances.”

During a set of performances at the university at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday, the W&L Repertory Dance Company will have a student running a live Twitter feed with context and commentary for dance pieces.

This isn’t quite a backchannel since the dance company is having a single student tweet a live commentary on the dance.  However, the idea of having a backchannel available during performances like this one is certainly intriguing.  It would seem to be a great tool for helping students make sense of a performance by having them comment on and ask questions about the performance as it occurs–not unlike what Mary Dave Blackman (East Tennessee State University) does with clickers in her music appreciation classes.  For public performances, a backchannel might help interest and engage an audience used to a certain level of interactivity in their entertainment.

Blog readers, have you heard of similar uses of Twitter and/or backchannel during performances?  I would love to hear about a few more examples of this.

Gardner Campbell and two of his Baylor University colleagues, librarian Ellen Filgo and first-year student Alexis Tracy, presented a talk at the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference on their use of Twitter in Gardner’s first-year seminar course on new media.  The talk, “Twitter Symbiosis: A Librarian, a Hashtag, and a First-Year Seminar,” is online (video + slides) thanks to ELI, which meant I could “attend” the presentation in spite of the fact that I didn’t go to the ELI conference.  I recently posted nine uses for backchannel in education, and Gardner’s talk provides another great example of the potential of Twitter-facilitated backchannel conversations in college teaching.

In a nutshell, here’s how Gardner incorporated Twitter in his course: As part of their class participation, Gardner’s students were encouraged to open Twitter accounts and participate in backchannel discussion on Twitter during class sessions, using a course-specific hashtag to make their tweets easy to find and follow.  Moreover, Ellen Filgo, a university librarian, participated in the Twitterstream, too, although she did not attend class sessions in general.  Instead, she followed the Twitter conversation from her office (by loading a column in her Tweetdeck application that searched for the course hashtag) and contributed resources and ideas to the backchannel discussion.

How did Gardner and his students use the backchannel?  I’ll use my “nine uses” as a framework here.  Gardner’s students engaged in notetaking, sharing resources with each other, commenting on the class discussion and presentations given by Gardner and by fellow students, asking questions of Gardner and each other, and helping one another by suggesting answers to those questions.  Also, Gardner was intentional about using the backchannel and other mechanisms (including student blogs “fed” into a course “mother blog” and social bookmarking via Delicious) to build community in his course.

Perhaps what is most interesting about this example is that the inclusion of librarian Ellen Filgo served to open the classroom to those not physically present.  In the talk, Ellen describes her participation in the backchannel as “librarian jazz,” referring to the improvisational quality of her interactions with the students.  She knew the topic of each class session’s conversation, but didn’t always have the readings ahead of time and couldn’t hear the verbal conversation in the room.  This meant that she had to suggest resources and answers to student questions based entirely on the Twitterstream in real time.  In the ELI talk, both Ellen and Gardner referred to “agile” teaching, one of my favorite terms, which made me smile!

Ellen noted that one positive outcome of this participation was that she was involved in the students’ research work at a much earlier point in that work than is typical for her work with students.  She was thus able to assist students in valuable ways, and the students’ understanding of the role of the library in their work was enhanced.

If you watch the talk online, be sure to listen to Gardner’s student, Alexis Tracy, describe her experiences in the course.  Using social media (Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking) in an academic setting was new to her, and she became very interested in Twitter in particular.  She’s remarkably reflective and well-spoken about the impact the backchannel had on her learning in the course.  I was impressed that she described herself as an “epistemologist”–that’s a word I didn’t learn until graduate school!

Here are a few other points that Gardner and his colleagues make in their talk:

• It’s important to use a course-specific hashtag.  That makes finding class tweets easy and helps to create a sense of community.
• Be sure to archive the class tweets using a service like Twapper Keeper which creates a permanent archive of all tweets using a particular hashtag.  They didn’t do this and regretted it later when they discovered that Twitter’s search function doesn’t go that far back.
• Gardner’s students all gave class presentations.  During the presentations, the other students participated in the backchannel as usual.  This provided a useful source of feedback to the presenting students, who would frequently read through those tweets after class.  I’m tempted to call this a “tenth” use of backchannel.  It falls under the category of students helping one another, but when the student being helped is the presenter, this use is, in a way, more significant.
• Near the end of the talk, Gardner says, “If you want your students to tweet well, then you need to tweet well.”  If not, that is, if you ask your students to engage in an activity in which you yourself do not engage, your students are likely to view it as busywork and not view it as a valuable learning activity.  Gardner has enough experience blogging and having his students blog that I consider this sound advice.

See the online archive of the talk for other points, including Gardner’s approach to grading backchannel participation, a great anecdote about how a question moved from the backchannel to the frontchannel, and some warnings about what can go wrong when students aren’t prepared well for this kind of participation.  Thanks to Gardner, Ellen, and Alexis for sharing their experiences with this very new form of classroom interaction!

[Note: This post has nothing directly to do with teaching with classroom response systems.  However, I found the book reviewed below a great read, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it somewhere.  Also, I think the book has some implications for those teaching courses where student perspective clicker questions are common.]

In researching his book The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Tim Clydesdale, a sociologist at the College of New Jersey, conducted in-depth interviews with 75 teenagers, many of whom he interviewed before and after their first year out of high school.  The interviewees were diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious background, and socioeconomic class, and they came from six states in the Northeast as well as Oregon.  In the book, Clydesdale describes how these teens navigated relationships, managed gratifications, approached work, spent money, and experienced college.  Clydesdale shares the stories of several of his interview subjects (de-identified), and these stories make concrete the broader conclusions Clydesdale draws from his research.

Perhaps most relevant to college and university educators are Clydesdale’s conclusions regarding the first-year student experience:

During their first year out, American teens become cognitively sharper but intellectually immune.  The overwhelming majority of American teens are practical credentialists.  They understand that diplomas are necessary for better jobs and that for the highest status jobs, grades are important, too.  Thus, they become adept at playing the game of college, putting in minimal effort to obtain the desired grade.

Clydesdale argues that while first-year students gain improved cognitive and communication skills in college, they retain very little of the content to which they are exposed in their first year.  Furthermore, Clydesdale asserts that “intellectual curiosity is not a value that [they] esteem.”  He notes that this disinterest in intentional learning is not unique to first-year students; American adults are rarely intellectually curious.  Thus American teens’ experiences with learning reflect those of mainstream American society.

First-year students tend to have narrow perspectives on political, economic, and social issues, according to Clydesdale.  That is to say, their perspectives on such issues rarely broaden during their first year out.  Instead, they put their core identities-their perspectives on family, faith, and community-in “identity lockboxes” their first year out.  Instead of embracing or even exploring broader perspectives, they focus on what Clydesdale calls “daily life management,” learning to navigate relationship, manage gratifications, balance work and school and play, and generally learn to take care of themselves more independently.  Clydesdale writes, “Most American teens… actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism.”

In his final chapter, Clydesdale provides recommendations for educators based on his research.  He suggests that educators take an “end-user’s perspective” to their work, helping students to identify their interests and then designing learning experiences that connect those interests to existing bodies of knowledge, improve students’ cognitive and communication skills, and provide students with applied problem-solving experience that draws on that knowledge and those skills.  He suggests that educators should identify the knowledge and skills that college graduates retain and use and “work backward” to design a “student-centered curriculum” that fosters that knowledge and those skills.

Clydesdale asserts that educators who attempt to broaden their first-year students’ perspectives are wasting their time because students are too focused on daily life management to open their identity lockboxes.  He suggests that such perspective work might occur during college students’ sophomore and junior years, when they are not experiencing significant transitions in life, but he leaves that as an open question.

The qualitative research that Tim Clydesdale summarizes in The First Year Out is persuasive, and it provides insights into the first-year experience that are sometimes lacking in survey data.  Most of the student stories he shares in the book come from his interviews with New Jersey students, and there is some geographical bias in his narrative.  However, his findings are based on interviews with students across the county and thus are worth consideration by all educators.  His recommendations speak directly to the first-year curriculum and support the use of seminar classes focused on writing, speaking, and analytical skills.

Clydesdale’s warning that educators who seek to broaden their first-year students’ perspectives are wasting their time is a sobering one.  He notes that some students (including, perhaps surprisingly, many of those at religious colleges) do broaden their perspectives and are intellectually curious, so it is certainly possible for first-year students to have transformative experiences.  However, he also notes that many of those who do end up entering the professoriate.  The First Year Out makes a strong case that we educators should not assume our students are like us, and that we should seek to better understand our students so that we can better prepare them to more meaningfully engage with the world.

For more on Tim Clydesdale’s work, visit his home page.  Also, read his January 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology.”

I’ll be presenting a Higher Ed Hero webinar on teaching with clickers next week on Thursday, February 4th, at 12 noon Central time.  I’ll be sharing some strategies for engaging students with clicker activities, using clickers to better understand students and practice “agile teaching,” and using clicker questions to foster respect among students.  Registration info can be found here.

Reference: DeBourgh, G. A. (2008). Use of classroom “clickers” to promote acquisition of advanced reasoning skills. Nurse Education in Practice, 8(2), 76-87.

Summary: Gregory DeBourgh provides a useful introduction to using clickers in nursing education, focusing on pedagogical strategies that use clickers to promote critical thinking.  His exploration of critical thinking in the context of nursing education is particularly interesting.  Here’s a sample:

“Reasoning is about using intellectual power to draw conclusions, form judgments, and make inferences based on evidence, education, and experience… The practical significance of acquiring skill in advanced reasoning is to move to the level of predictive clinical reasoning which enables one to anticipate both ideal and likely outcomes given a set of data.”

DeBourgh argues that using classroom response systems to engage students in high-level questions is an effective strategy for developing their critical thinking skills.  He supports this assertion by drawing on the literature on the roles of feedback and questioning in learning and by sharing concrete examples of clicker uses in nursing education.

Included are three sample questions, including a “one-best-answer” question that asks students to identify the likely cause of a particular symptom shown by a patient in a case study.  DeBourgh endorses the use of such questions since they better represent situations students are likely to encounter in clinical settings where they must deal with ambiguity.  He also suggests asking question sequences based around patient cases that “change the focus to add new variables,” noting that doing so also reduces the cognitive load students experience when familiarizing themselves with a new case.

DeBourgh makes a good argument for using clicker questions to model critical thinking skills for students:

“Anticipate likely incorrect responses and prepare ‘talking points’ for discussion as this facilitates ‘thinking on your feet’ and makes more visible to students how an expert uses heuristics, reasoning, and refined problem-solving skills to gain command of a clinical situation.”

Asking questions designed to provide an opportunity for the instructor to model critical thinking is one instance of many DeBourgh describes of crafting questions to meet particular teaching and learning objectives.  In doing so, DeBourgh draws on articles by Ian Beatty on good question design, transferring Ian’s advice to the context of nursing education.

DeBourgh also points out that clicker questions embedded in PowerPoint can be particularly useful in nursing, a field which frequently uses pictures, diagrams, sound clips, and video–media that can also be embedded in PowerPoint.  He also notes that nursing courses often involve discussion of nursing ethics and student opinions about ethical decisions, topics that lend themselves well to clicker questions.

The article also includes results from a study survey about clicker use.  Student responses to rating questions are summarized, and student responses to open-ended questions are presented, as well.

DeBourgh ends with a few challenges involved in teaching with clickers, two of which are particularly significant.  He notes that since instructors can track student performance in a class on a daily basis, expectations for students are raised, which is not popular with all students.  DeBourgh also speaks to the increased expectations for instructors:

“The greatest challenge is the new role for faculty to plan the curriculum and instruction around ‘deep comprehension’ rather than ‘covering content’ using a traditional lecture format.”

Comments: I read this article in advance of my presentation at the Health Professional Educational Research Symposium earlier in the month, and I was particularly impressed with Gregory DeBourgh’s eloquence in describing critical thinking in the context of nursing education and in describing ways that clicker pedagogies can foster those critical thinking skills.

As I’ve tried to capture above, DeBourgh describes a variety of ways of using clickers in nursing education, and he included one approach that was entirely new to me, one inspired by the 50-50 option in the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? DeBourgh suggests that before the correct answer to a clicker question is revealed to students, an instructor might ask the students which answer choices should be eliminated.  It’s a little unclear how DeBourgh implements this, but I can even imagine setting up a multiple-mark question with four answer choices, then asking students not to select the one correct answer but to select two incorrect answers.  This would offer a nice change of pace in question format and would help students focus on more than just the correct answer.  It’s often useful for students to consider why some answer choices are plausible on the surface but actually incorrect.

Hopefully it’s also above that DeBourgh puts an emphasis on teaching with case studies (multimedia case studies, at that) in his article.  I understand that case study methods are perhaps more common in nursing than they are in other disciplines, and I appreciated reading this article as a way to better understand why that was the case.  DeBourgh’s comments about using clickers for discussing ethics also helped me better understand the disciplinary context here.

If you’re a nursing educator, please share a thought or two about using clickers in your field in the comments section!

Update: Greg DeBourgh emailed me and clarified his 50-50 technique.  Here’s what he said:

I display the potential four-answers to a given question, then before the students “vote” with their clickers, I ask for a volunteer or select a student at random (my clicker system has this feature) and ask the student to eliminate 2 of the 4 potential answers and to explain why they are eliminating these two. This speaking out loud of their rationale for eliminating two of the potential answers that are not related to the question strengthens the students’ reasoning skills. They actually get quite good at it. If the student I called upon to answer hesitates or is reluctant to speak, I invite them to choose a “consultant” in the room to help them out. I hope this clarifies a bit for you.

I asked Greg what he does if the student eliminates the correct answer.  Here’s his response:

If the student eliminates one of the correct answers, it is still learning, and so I ask “does everyone agree with the 50/50 elimination?” If someone objects, I ask for their rationale. If no one objects, I just let the process go and during the “reveal and rationale” we talk about why each answer is incorrect or correct.

Thanks, Greg, for this clarification, and for this great use of clickers.

I wanted to share some additional thoughts on Cliff Atkinson’s new book, The Backchannel, and its implications for higher education.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first chapter of the book is available online and provides a very clear introduction to the logistics and possibilities of the backchannel.  What might the backchannel look like in educational settings?  Here are a couple of examples.

“The Twitter Experiment,” a five-minute YouTube video, shows how UT-Dallas history professor Monica Rankin used Twitter to facilitate a backchannel discussion.  In her case, she had a somewhat large class that she broke into smaller discussion groups.  The students were encouraged to post their thoughts on Twitter during the small-group discussion time.  The Twitterstream was displayed on the big screen for the whole class to see.  This led to some “cross-fertilization” of small-group discussions as ideas generated by one group were read and discussed by other groups.  Dr. Rankin also had a TA monitor the backchannel, responding to student questions and surfacing important points for Dr. Rankin to discuss with the entire class from time to time during the class session.  For more details on Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter, see my earlier post on this topic.

Purdue University has developed a system called Hotseat that facilitates backchannel discussion.  This system allows students to contribute to the backchannel in a variety of ways, including Twitter and Facebook.  The student contributes are typically displayed on a big screen for the entire class to see, and the instructor typically takes a “Hotseat break” of sorts every now and then to respond to the questions raised in the backchannel.  Students can comment on other students’ posts and they can “vote up” comments or questions their peers post so that instructors have an easier time identifying the most pressing topics.  The Purdue team shared their work on Hotseat at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative earlier today, and, according to Twitter user @eyb, who “live-tweeted” the presentation, students really liked the system.  They didn’t necessarily think it helped them learn better, but they liked it and they wanted their instructors to spend more time responding to the questions raised in the backchannel.

(I’ve been meaning to talk about Hotseat here on the blog for a while now.  Thanks to @eyb for some great reporting at ELI!  I feel I have a much better sense of the system now, technologically and pedagogically.)

What are some other ways that backchannel might function in educational settings?  Cliff Atkinson describes some common and uncommon uses of the backchannel in Chapter 3 of his book.  Here are my thoughts on how Atkinson’s uses might map over to educational settings:

• Notetaking: Students can take their notes during a class in the backchannel.  This provides an electronic (and thus searchable) set of notes for the student.  Moreover, students can read and use each other’s notes more easily.  You might even select two or three students each day to be official class note-takers, freeing other students up for more engagement in class.
• Sharing Resources: Students can also look online (or, call me crazy, in their textbooks) for information that supplements the lecture or class discussion.  It’s easy to share links in the backchannel thanks to all the URL shortening services, and students can be very good at finding useful and relevant information online.  And if a resource shared by a student isn’t useful or relevant, it creates an opportunity to discuss with students how to find and evaluate online information resources.
• Commenting: Students can also comment on the ideas being share or discussed in class.  Just providing a visible venue for student comments is likely to encourage more students to reflect actively during class.  Plus, students can read and respond to each others’ reflections.  Sure, students can contribute to online discussions after class, but there’s something exciting about having more students engage in discussions during class–more than just those who are bold enough and quick enough to contribute verbally.
• Amplifying: The Hotseat feature mentioned above that allows students to “vote up” peer comments they find important is an example of what Atkinson calls “amplifying what others are saying.”  On Twitter, this happens via retweeting: If a comment is retweeted frequently, then many people find it interesting enough to share.  Google Moderator is a free service that works similarly–students can post questions and others can vote them up or down.  This kind of feature is a great way to handle the problem I’ve identified here on the blog several times: It’s really hard for an instructor to follow and make sense of the backchannel during class given the open-ended nature of the comments.  Giving the students the ability to identify more or less relevant comments is one way to help with this.  (Monica Rankin’s use of a moderator–her TA–is another.)
• Asking Questions: I’ve put this a few spots down the list since I think it’s a more obvious use of the backchannel than some of the ones listed above.  Backchannel provides students an additional way to ask questions.  Students are frequently hesitant to ask questions in class for a variety of mostly social reasons–they don’t want to look “dumb” in front of their instructor or their peers.  Anonymous backchannel discussions make it extremely easy for these students to surface their questions.  Even when students are identified on the backchannel, having a venue where questions are encouraged is likely to make it easier for students to share questions.  And if the backchannel includes an amplification tool, then students can support each others’ question-asking very directly.
• Helping One Another: Keep in mind that there are several kinds of backchannel conversations, including student-to-student conversations.  When one student poses a question on the backchannel, another student might very well answer that question before the instructor can get to it.  This kind of peer instruction is a common use of clickers, and it can work well in the backchannel, too.
• Offering Suggestions: The backchannel can give students a voice in where a class discussion goes.  Students can suggest discussion topics or questions.  They can also suggest useful readings, activities, or topics for subsequent classes.  They can provide instructors with feedback on what’s working and what’s not from their perspective.  Many instructors have students complete a “minute paper” at the end of each class in which students identify the most important point of the day or ask a question.  The backchannel allows instructors to gather this kind of feedback whenever students are ready to share it during class.
• Building Community: Particularly in large classes, it can be hard for students to get to know more than just the few students they sit near.  Backchannel discussions can help students get to know each other in a variety of ways.  I would argue that it’s important for students to have avatars or icons attached to their backchannel posts, preferably photos of themselves.  Seeing someone’s face along with their comments and their name helps build actual, not just virtual community.
• Opening the Classroom: Some backchannels are private; that is, only the instructor and students can see or participate in the backchannel conversation.  Others, like Twitter, are public, allowing those outside the classroom to participate in the discussion.  This provides an opportunity to open the class discussion to those not currently enrolled in the course–students taking other courses, students who took the course in the past, academic experts at other institutions, and more.  These external people have the potential to learn from and contribute to the backchannel discussion.

That was fun thinking through these options!  You can have fun, too: What did I miss?  Comments or suggestions for the uses I’ve listed above?

Last weekend I was honored to give the opening keynote at Nova Southeastern University’s Health Professions Education Research Symposium (HPERS) in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  (And, yes, Ft. Lauderdale is a great place to be in mid-January!)  Below you’ll find the slides from my presentation.  Many of my slides are designed to visually complement my verbal presentation, so they might not make too much sense on their own.  Still, I think they’ll give you a sense of what I talked about.  There are also some sample clicker questions in the slidedeck appropriate for the health professions.

And speaking of backchannel, I live-tweeting during several of the presentations later in the day at HPERS.  Here are the highlights of the conference for me, according to my Twitterstream.

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, has a new book out, The Backchannel, from New Riders Press (publishers of Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen).  I’ve discussed the use of backchannel in the past, and I consider backchannel technology to be part of the more general category of classroom response systems.  I just finished reading The Backchannel, which focuses primarily on backchannel use in business and conference settings, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the book and what those of us in educational contexts might learn from it.

First, a little definitional work.  The term backchannel refers to three kinds of conversations that usually don’t occur in traditional one-to-many lectures or presentations.  I call backchannel type 1 the conversation that occurs among students or audience members.  This kind of backchannel has been around forever, but until the advent of laptops, netbooks, and smart phones, it was usually limited to whispering to your neighbor and passing notes.

I use backchannel type 2 to refer to the feedback that students or audience members provide to an instructor or presenter.  This, too, has been around forever, in the form of brief Q&A interchanges between the person at the podium and those in the seats, but now with services like Twitter and Hotseat, students and audience members can share their thoughts with instructors and presenters in very different ways.

There is a third kind of backchannel that’s distinctly different from types 1 and 2.  Traditionally, the only participants in a lecture or presentation were the people in the room at the time.  However, Twitter, blogs, and other social media tools allow conversations to extend beyond the physical room.  Presenters and audience members alike can share ideas, questions, and resources with people outside the room following the conversation virtually through social media.  And those virtual participants can interact with those in the room by sharing ideas and resources and asking questions of those in the room.

In his book, Atkinson describes very clearly the roles these three different kinds of backchannel can play in a lecture or presentation, illustrating his points with many examples of backchannel uses both successful and unsuccessful at recent national conferences.  The first chapter, available online, is a particularly easy-to-follow introduction to backchannel technology (Twitter, in particular) as well as questions, concerns, and opportunities that backchannel presents for those at the front of the room.  If you’re not sure what all the buzz about Twitter and backchannel is all about (and you’re still reading this post!), then I recommend you read through Atkinson’s first chapter.  It’s a great starting point for understanding the logistics and dynamics of backchannel.

Subsequent chapters provide a step-by-step guide to getting started with Twitter, explorations of the risks and rewards of backchannel, and Atkinson’s recommendations for making the most of backchannel before, during, and after a presentation, including advice for handling an “unruly” backchannel.  This last advice is accompanied by an examination of how social media expert Chris Brogan “tamed” a rough backchannel conversation at a conference last September.

As noted, Atkinson does a great job of explaining backchannel and its potential for good and for bad.  He also presents several useful “what would you do?” scenarios throughout the book, asking the readers to put themselves in the shoes of a particular presenter, moderator, or audience member.  The book is written in an informal, engaging style, with helpful images, screenshots, and diagrams throughout.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking and blogging about the backchannel, and I still took away several interesting, useful, practical tips from Atkinson’s book about managing backchannel conversations.

My primary criticism of Atkinson’s book is that he is a little too prescriptive with his advice.  I know that every instructor’s teaching context is different–different institution, different students, different topics, different teaching strength, and so on–so I tried in my book on teaching with clickers to describe a variety of options for teaching with clickers, along with pros and cons for those options, so that readers might decide for themselves what teaching choices to make.  Atkinson does a little of that in his book, but for the most part he tells the reader what they should do when leveraging the backchannel.  I respect his expertise on this subject, but there were several times while reading the book that I could easily imagine presenting or teaching contexts in which his recommendations would not work well.

I took about 15 pages of handwritten notes as I was reading The Backchannel, and I plan to write more about the book, particularly its implications for those of us educational settings.  In the meantime, I’ll end with two quotes from the book.  The first one is found on page 31 and addresses the educational context:

Some educators have been experimenting with using Twitter and other social media technologies to introduce a backchannel to the classroom, a practice that has generated intense criticism from those who see it as a threat to traditional lecture formats and established pedagogy.

The second one makes clear what Atkinson thinks about this debate and is one of several times Atkinson argues that the rise of the backchannel will fundamentally change the world of presentations:

The traditional lecture format, bullet point slides, and post-presentation Q&A session are becoming dinosaurs in this fast-moving world.  Each of these social tools has offered some efficiency or benefit that was appropriate for the time, but times are radically changing, and it is time for these methods to evolve into new ones that are a better fit for our needs.

What do you think?  With mobile computing identified in the 2010 Horizon Report as an emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on campuses in the next one or two years, what role do you see for backchannel in college and university teaching in the near future?