Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk on social media has some interesting implications for future classroom dynamics.  As you watch Shirky’s 17-minute talk (embedded below), think about translating his ideas to educational settings.

Here’s the slide that stood out to me:

This is Shirky’s visualization of the 20th century model of getting one’s message out.  One producer, one message (regardless of recipient), high cost of distribution.  Doesn’t this model look like the one-to-many model used in a lot of college teaching?

Here’s the new model from Shirky:

This is the 21st century model powered by social media.  Everyone becomes a potential producer, multiple messages are produced that are more relevant to their receipients, and distribution is cheap and (relatively) easy.

Shirky gives the example of the community on MyBarackObama.com during the US election last year.  Millions of Obama’s supporters contributed to the discussions on this site, sometimes collaborating to express disapproval of Obama’s decisions.  Shirky says, “[The Obama campaign] had understood that their role with MyBarackObama.com was to convene their supporters, not to control their supporters.”

Might our classrooms look more like this, with every student contributing to the shared learning experience?  What if the teacher’s role was not to control the students’ learning, but to convene a learning opportunity for the students, one that leverages the many possible connections between and among students?

Shirky ends his talk with this: “Media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups…  The question we all face now is, How can we make best use of these media even thought it means changing the way we’ve always done it?”

Given the ways that social media are changing how we communicate outside of the classroom, I think it makes sense to explore the ways that social media–and classroom response systems, broadly defined–might change the dynamics of learning inside the classroom, too.

Last week teacher Lisa Short of Gaithersburg Middle School in Maryland shared her perspectives on educational technology with the education committee of the United States House of Representatives.  Education Week covered this presentation, and you can see an eight-minute video of Short’s presentation below.  The first half of her presentation is focused on interactive whiteboards.  The clickers are demonstrated just after 5 minutes in.

Short’s presentation caught my eye because she demonstrated classroom response system technology to the committee, arguing that the anonymity the system provides her students allows her to more accurate assess their misconceptions and prior knowledge since they can answer her clicker questions honestly without fear of embarrassment in front of their peers.

Short also mentioned that between class sessions, she can see which students miss her questions, providing her useful data with which to evaluate her lessons.  For instance, do some students have particular learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile, and so on) that she could address more effectively in future lessons?  And if most of her students miss a question, she knows she’ll need to return to that topic in the next class session.

I’m glad that this House committee had a chance to learn about educational technologies like clickers and interactive whiteboards.  I wish that Short had mentioned that the results of clicker questions can be used immediately to make teaching choices, not just between classes.  The capacity to facilitate such agile teaching is a strength of the technology.

Also, the fact that all of the members of the committee answered her clicker question (about the percent of schools in the US with interactive whiteboards) correctly was a little disappointing, since it meant their was no opportunity to talk about peer instruction.  However, that result did set up her punchline effectively–that only 16% of US schools have interactive whiteboards but 70% of UK schools do!

It was @RogerFreedman who pointed me (via Twitter) to this short essay about the use of clickers in small political science classes.  In the essay, University of Denver political science professor Tom Knecht shares several reasons why he uses clickers in his small (15-25 student) classes.  Knecht echoes many of the reasons I provided for using clickers in a recent post, so, as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

• Knecht uses clickers for formative assessment, gauging his students’ understanding of points he makes during his lectures.  He finds that his students are often hesitant to ask questions when they don’t understand something, so clickers help him discover what’s unclear.
• He also uses clickers for graded quizzes, motivating his students to prepare for class.  Clickers allow him to distribute these quiz questions throughout a class session, instead of clustering them at the beginning or end of class on a paper quiz.
• He also finds that the fact that students’ responses are anonymous (as far as their peers are concerned) motivates his students to engage more fully in classwide discussions, particularly around questions on sensitive topics.  (These kinds of topics can arise frequently in political science courses.)  Since all students are asked to respond to his clicker questions, they are all more prepared to engage in the discussion that follows, which enhances that discussion.

Political science courses, like others in the social sciences, often involve questions that have correct and incorrect answers, critical-thinking questions that have multiple defensible answers, and student opinion questions.  As a result, clickers are great tools for these courses, as we see here.

I’ve hit a bit of a milestone here on the blog.  You’re now reading my 100th post.  I started this blog last summer after I finished writing my book as a way to stay current with the literature and news surrounding classroom response systems.  At that time, I set a goal to post 100 times in the first year.  It feels great to have achieved that goal.

What’s happened in the last year?

I’ve reviewed 23 research articles and a few published case studies.  I’ve commented on articles and essays appearing in Inside Higher Ed, the New York Times, the Encyclopedia Brittanica blog, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I’ve reported from the EDUCAUSE national conference, the University of Louisville clickers conference, the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and the Abilene Christian University ConnectEd Summit.  I’ve posted two podcast episodes.  I was interviewd by Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the National Teaching & Learning Forum. And, oh yeah, my book came out!

I’ve also raised a few questions that are still open:

• Are there differences in the impact of the use of clickers between male and female students?
• What impact might teaching with clickers have on students with learning disabilities?
• Who were the early pioneers in the use of electronic classroom response systems?

There were a few important national developments, too.  Cell phones turned into commonly used response devices.  Abilene Christian University, among other schools, launched iPhone initiatives, raising the idea of using mobile phones as “super-clickers.”  Twitter hit the scene in a major way, functioning as a classroom response system in its own way.

Thanks to Google Analytics, I can share a few fun facts about hits on this blog:

• The blog has received over 17,000 pageviews in the last year.  That works out to about 1440 a month on average.
• The most popular posts (in terms of pageviews) have been The Costs (and Benefits) of Clickers, A Few Question Banks, Article: Stowell & Nelson (2007), Clickers and Student Gender, and Clicker Conference: Tim Stelzer Keynote.
• The most popular categories of posts have been Question Banks, Formative Assessment, Critical Thinking, Student Participation, and Mathematics.

I’m grateful to all my readers and to those who have left comments here.  As you can tell, I find teaching with classroom response systems a fascinating topic, and I’m excited to explore the technology and pedagogy–and to see what comes next.  Thanks for being a part of that.

I just discovered a blog post by Ann M. Little, a historian at Colorado State University, expressing a fair amount of skepticism about the use of classroom response systems in humanities courses.  There was even greater skepticism in the 50 comments her post received.  Since most of the comments seem to have been made by teachers with no experience using clickers, I thought I would chime in with some reasons why clickers can work very well in college classrooms, particularly humanities classrooms.  I had a lot to say, and, since I’m often asked “Why clickers?” I thought I would reproduce my comments here.

I’m a little late to this discussion, having just found it on a Google blog search, but I’ll agree with Joseph Axenroth and say that classroom response systems can be very effective tools for generating personal reflection, small-group discussion, and classwide discussion in classes both large and small, in the sciences as well as in the humanities.

Attending a lecture and taking notes works very well for some students, particularly the students who go on to careers in academia. They’re able to assimilate and process the information shared in the lecture as it comes to them and/or after class as they review their notes. Many students, however, benefit from more active processing of information during classtime, when their classmates and their instructors are available to help them process.

A well-crafted clicker question can go a long way in helping students make sense of new information during class. Let’s say you pose a multiple-choice question for which there is no single correct answer but for which there are perhaps more justifiable answers and less justifiable answers. Something like “Which of the following motivations best explains so-and-so’s actions in such-and-such novel?” Instead of posing this question, hoping that all your students take a moment to think about it, then hearing from the handful of students who have the time and courage to share a response, suppose you ask all of your students to respond to it using their clickers.

Sure, some students might just press a button, but since you’re using the clickers, you communicate a message to the students that you really do want to hear from all of them, not just the ones who raise their hands. Not only that, you’re giving each student a chance to consider the question, weigh arguments for and against each answer choice, and commit to what s/he thinks is the best answer–all before s/he hears what the other students think about the question.

All students are thus given a chance to respond independently to the question, which helps prepare them to engage more seriously with any discussion (small-group or classwide) of the question that follows. They’ve had time to formulate something to contribute to that discussion, and they’re more invested in the topic at hand since they’ve had to commit to an answer.

Furthermore, since their responses can be tracked, you can hold them accountable for their participation, which motivates them to participate. And since their responses aren’t identified to their peers, it creates a safer environment for risk-taking, since many students are hesitant to appear looking ignorant in front of their peers by volunteering a wrong answer.

The bar chart showing the distribution of responses gives you a quick sense of how your students are approaching the question at hand, and you can then respond to those results to guide the discussion in productive ways. For instance, if one of the options is a reasonable one, but wasn’t selected by many students, you can play devil’s advocate and help them reconsider that option.

Also, when multiple answers are popular, the bar chart shows students (a) that they’re not alone in their confusion and (b) that the question is one worth considering since their peers have such different views of it. This, too, can motivate students to participate in subsequent discussions.

And since students expect multiple-choice questions to have single correct answers (and, in fact, often expect every task or challenge to have a single correct answer, one that should be memorized and regurgitated on a test), when you tell them that the clicker question you’ve been discussing with them doesn’t have a single correct answer, you’re creating conditions that can have a very positive impact on their intellectual development!

I could go on, but I hope that some of the pedagogical benefits of classroom response systems are starting to become clear. These systems are popular in the natural and social sciences, but I would argue they have great potential for helping to create productive classroom dynamics in the humanities, particularly through the use of questions without single correct answers.

As Joseph Axenroth said, the technology is just a tool. A chalkboard is a tool, too, one that can be used in pedagogically productive ways or in pedagogically unproductive ways. As noted above, some of the criticisms of clickers stem from the less than ideal ways some universities and colleges relate to instructional technologies. That certainly occurs, which is why it’s important to implement clickers in sensible ways, opening up the door to the pedagogical benefits I’ve mentioned here.

Also, I’ll point out that your basic clicker runs about $20-25, not $60. Most of the systems available now are extremely fast, reliable, and easy to use. There are also systems that allow students to submit their responses via text-messaging or the Web, so students can use existing devices (cell phones, laptops) instead of clickers. So there are options for implementing the technology sensibly.

Monica Rankin has received some attention for her use of Twitter in the introductory history course she taught this spring at the University of Texas-Dallas, in part because Kim Smith, a UT-Dallas graduate student in the Emerging Media and Communication program, produced a video about Dr. Rankin’s “Twitter experiment” and posted it on YouTube.  I highly recommend you watch this five-minute video since it provides a useful overview of Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter as backchannel during class.

Dr. Rankin has also posted some additional thoughts about her use of Twitter that are worth reading.  Following up on my musings about the use of Twitter in the classroom in an early blog post, I have a few comments and questions about Rankin’s experiment.

First, however, I’ll point out that given the fairly broad definition I like to use for “classroom response system,” the use of Twitter in the classroom is most definitely on-topic for this blog!  In case you were wondering…

Rankin notes that her Monday and Wednesday classes followed a traditional lecture model.  It was in her Friday classes that she used Twitter and required her students to read historical essays and primary source documents.  She had her students “do the reading” on Fridays to help them prepare to engage in small-group, large-group, and Twitter-based discussions.  (She gave an open-notes quiz at the start of class to hold them accountable for the reading.)  This aligns quite well with Eric Mazur’s transfer-assimilation model of learning: Rankin used the Monday and Wednesday lectures and the pre-class readings to transfer information to the students and the Friday discussions to help students assimilate that information.  I wonder, however, if she might have had her students “do the reading” prior to the Monday and Wednesday classes, opening up the option of discussions (small-group, large-group, and Twitter-based) in those classes.

Rankin also notes that most of her students were not already Twitter users at the start of the semester.  They were, however, familiar with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, so the concept behind Twitter wasn’t entirely alien to them.  However, this meant that most students had to sign up for new Twitter accounts for Rankin’s course.  One of the aspects of Twitter that Dan Cohen noted in his crowdsourcing-via-Twitter experiment is the “multiplier effect,” in which a comment made on Twitter is “retweeted” (forwarded, to use email lingo) by those who follow the person that made the comment.  This allows comments to spread very rapidly through social networks and can bring many people into a conversation on Twitter very quickly.  Since Rankin’s students were mostly new to Twitter, this meant they likely had few followers on Twitter and thus the multiplier effect apparently not much of a factor in her course.  Rankin notes that she plans to use Twitter again this fall.  I wonder if she and her students will have enough followers in the fall to see how the multiplier effect might enhance or detract from her use of Twitter in the classroom.

The upside of having students create Twitter accounts for the course was that students could “Tweet” their comments during discussion without worrying what their friends outside of the class thought about their comments.  Students already using Twitter who had friends following them on Twitter might have been more circumspect regarding their comments.  Rankin might find this more of an issue in the fall, as more students begin using Twitter.  I’ve heard many students comment that they don’t like faculty to contact them on Facebook because they see Facebook as their social space and they don’t appreciate faculty intruding into that space.  Right now, students don’t see Twitter as “their” space, I think, but that might change as more of them start using it.  There might be some pushback from students regarding educational uses of Twitter in the fall.

Rankin provides a few practical tips for using Twitter in the classroom, too.

• It’s important that students tag their posts with a “hashtag” so that they can be found easily by other students through Twitter’s search tool.  Rankin took the step of using a different hashtag each week during the course, providing a way for students to also find their peers’ comments on particular topics in the course more easily (during, say, exam review time).
• Rankin displayed her students’ Twitter stream during class on the classroom projector system via Tweetdeck, a program that provides a fair amount of flexibility for finding and displaying Twitter content.  This meant that students without laptops or smart phones could see the conversation unfold while contributing to it via text-messaging on their regular mobile phones.  Rankin points out that the font size on Tweetdeck was small, however, leading me to think there’s an opportunity here to develop a Twitter application customized for classroom display.
• I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that the problem with responses to open-ended questions collected via classroom response systems is that there’s no easy way to make sense of these responses on the fly during class.  (In contrast, the bar chart that shows the responses to a multiple-choice question aggregates those responses very nicely.)  How did Dr. Rankin get around this?  She had her TA monitor the Twitter conversation during class, post comments, respond to questions, and notify Rankin (who would circulate among the students during class) of Twitter comments worth addressing to the whole class.  I think this is a great solution, and it’s a nice example of team-teaching.  (In fact, those who are already team-teaching classes might consider trying this out!)
• Rankin and her TA also used Twitter’s “favorites” feature to mark student comments that were particularly insightful or useful.  This is another way to make sense of student responses to open-ended questions, particularly looking ahead to students’ use of these responses as they study after class.

What’s unclear in Rankin’s reflections is how the Twitter discussion impacted the small-group and classwide discussion and vice versa.  It’s clear that there were such impacts, but I think collecting some data on this would be useful.  Since Twitter provides a record of student comments (who said what when, as well as who replied to whom), it’s a great source of data for investigating how students learn in this environment and what the discussion dynamics are.

Rankin notes that she provided her students with discussion topics to frame the small-group and Twitter-based discussion, but she doesn’t go into detail about these topics.  I wonder if particular types of topics or discussion questions work better or worse for encouraging meaningful Twitter conversation.  There’s another project waiting for someone!

What are your thoughts on the use of Twitter in the classroom to faciliate discussion?

A couple of weeks ago, Stephanie Chasteen shared a series of blog posts on teaching with clickers in upper-division physics courses: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.  I’m often asked if clickers work well in upper-division courses, yet I’ve not met many faculty members who use them in such courses.  So I was glad to see this series by Stephanie.  It’s adapted from a talk she gave at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference a few months ago, and it includes videos that feature interviews with faculty and students about teaching and learning with clickers.  Here are some highlights from Stephanie’s posts…

One of the students interviewed in the video in Part 1 of the series says that she likes clicker questions because they allow her to take a concept and metaphorically put in her pocket.  I like that metaphor.  It indicates that the clicker question allows her to confirm that she understands a concept, which is useful during class since it helps prepare her for what follows.  This idea that clicker questions allow students to test themselves on concepts during class is one that shows up often in student surveys as a positive aspect of using clickers.  This self-testing is a type of formative assessment, and Stephanie notes it’s important to include even in small classes.

Another type of formative assessment is also mentioned in the same video.  Steven Pollock, whom I interviewed for my book, mentions that prior to using clickers he found himself making assumptions about what his students did and did not understand.  He notes that clickers provide him actual data on his students’ learning so he doesn’t have to rely on his assumptions.  I wonder if this aspect of using clickers is even more important in upper-level courses since common student misconceptions in these courses may not be as well known as in lower-level courses.

Several different types of clicker questions are mentioned in Stephanie’s series: conceptual questions, application questions, review questions used at the start of class, procedural questions asking students to identify the next correct step in a derivation.  I like the conceptual question Steven shared that distinguishes between students approaching physics from a classical mechanics point of view and those using a quantum mechanics approach.  I can imagine this kind of question is particularly useful for students making the transition to an upper-level course like quantum mechanics.

One of the arguments against using clickers in upper-level courses that Stephanie says she hears is that students in these courses are sophisticated learners.  They don’t need the structure of clicker-facilitated peer instruction to help them learn.  Stephanie presents a strong counter-argument, that since these students are more sophisticated learners, they actually get more out of the peer instruction method, more seriously engaging in small-group and classwide discussions.

Stephanie also shares some interesting data on student perceptions of clickers in upper-level courses.  Students who took a non-clicker upper-level course were asked how they would feel if they had taken the course with clickers.  They were resistant, arguing that clickers were for lower-level courses.  However, students who actually went through a clicker-enhanced upper-level course were extremely enthusiastic about their use.  Stephanie points out that students aren’t always able to predict how they’ll respond to a particular teaching approach, which is an important point to remember when trying out new approach in one’s teaching.

Take a look at Stephanie’s blog posts for more thoughts on using clickers in upper-level courses, including thoughts on their role in creating “times for telling.”  Stephanie also contributes to the clickers efforts at the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia, where they’ve put together a 36-page guide to using clickers in the sciences.

I had hoped that my second podcast episode would follow the first one a little more closely in time, but the spring semester got away from me, particularly with the book coming out in February.  However, I’ve got a great interview for you this time around.

This episode features an interview with Kelly Cline, associate professor of mathematics at Carroll College in Montana.  Kelly and two of his colleagues at Carroll, Holly Zullo and Mark Parker, are principal investigators for a National Science Foundation project called Project Math Quest.  Kelly and his collaborators have written and tested clicker questions for linear algebra and differential equations courses, and they’ve made their question bank–consisting of hundreds of questions–available online.

In this interview, Kelly talks about the ways that he uses clickers and classroom voting, as well as his energy and enthusiasm, to motivate his students to engage meaningfully with mathematical concepts and logical thinking in the classroom.  He also talks about elements of effective clicker questions, as well as how he has modified his approach to teaching to include more active learning elements while still covering all the content he needs to in his courses.

Click the following link to download and listen to the interview:

Podcast #2 - An Interview with Kelly Cline [41:14]

Links:

• Kelly Cline’s home page
• Project Math QUEST

Last month, I facilitated an online workshop on teaching with clickers for the TLT Group.  We spent some time in the workshop focusing first on what I’ve been calling “learning trajectories” around faculty use of clickers: How do instructors new to clickers usually use them?  How do instructors change their approach to using clickers over time?  What are some roadblocks that instructors experience when experimenting with clickers?  How is teaching with clickers informed by beliefs about teaching and learning?  How does it inform those beliefs?

With some possible answers to those questions in mind, the workshop participants and I brainstormed ways to support instructors using clickers.  Below you’ll find my summary of those ideas.  I think it’s a useful menu of options for encouraging and supporting clicker use.

Peer Support

• Encourage faculty with experience teaching with clickers to mentor faculty new to clickers. (This was cited by several groups as the most effective method.)
• Encourage faculty not using clickers to visit the classes of faculty using clickers and discuss clickers afterward.
• Encourage faculty who use clickers to team-teach courses to show their colleagues how clickers can work in the classroom.
  

Learning Communities

• Assemble working groups of faculty teaching similar courses to create question banks collaboratively.
• Create a faculty learning community consisting of faculty from different disciplines interested in teaching with clickers, perhaps with a focus on SoTL with or about clickers.
• Gather faculty using clickers for a lunch near the end of the semester where they can share their experiences with each other.

Online Resources

• Create an online, collaborative workspace (e.g. a wiki) where faculty can share clicker questions, uses, and resources.
• Create department question banks that all faculty in a department can draw from and contribute to.
• Find and share short online videos about teaching and learning with clickers, particularly ones featuring interviews with faculty and students.
• Direct faculty to published articles on teaching with clickers in their disciplines.

Increasing Exposure

• Have faculty share their uses of clickers in “showcase” events for other faculty.
• Highlight faculty using clickers in newsletters and on Web sites.
• Use clickers creatively in workshops on other teaching topics as well as other events attended by faculty (e.g. new faculty orientation, faculty meetings) to expose faculty to them and model their use.

Workshops on Clickers

• When holding workshops on teaching with clickers, be sure to share concrete examples of discipline-specific clicker questions and uses.
• When holding workshops, start by having faculty use clickers as they would if they were students.
• Hold regular workshops on teaching with clickers so that faculty can attend when they have time.

Miscellaneous

• Encourage or require faculty using clickers (either by ordering clickers through the bookstore or by borrowing a kit) to attend a training workshop.
• Have tech support in a faculty member’s classroom the first time s/he uses clickers.  If this support person can also discuss clicker pedagogy with the faculty member after class, all the better.
• Work with institutional research groups to collect and share data (quantitative, qualitative) on clicker usage and faculty and student perceptions of clickers.

Which of these do you think would be most effective at your institution?

I have (indirectly) disturbed Bill McKeachie.  Last month, I mentioned here that James Rhem interviewed me for a lead article in the National Teaching & Learning Forum newsletter he edits.  That article has recently been reproduced on the Tomorrow’s Professor Blog.  One way or another, Bill McKeachie, author of the well-known McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, read the article.  He emailed a response to James Rhem, who forwarded the email me.  McKeachie writes:

I’m always disturbed when I read an article about clickers and no mention is made of Dick Brandt, Professor of Physics here at Michigan, who introduced clickers in his classes in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s.  I think that was the origin of the idea.

I’ll admit I’m not a clickers historian.  I’ve focused my energies on best practices with the current technology and haven’t read much about early versions of clickers.  However, I’m not familiar with Dick Brandt’s work, nor is his work mentioned in the histories of clickers with which I’m familiar, notably Judson and Sawada, 2002.

Have you heard of Dick Brandt’s work?  Before I ask Bill McKeachie if he has a reference to which he can point me, I thought I might query my blog readers.  Judson and Sawada point to some early wired classroom response systems in the 1960s and 70s, as well as some wired systems the United States military used with filmed instructional material.  Does anyone know of use of classroom response systems in colleges or universities prior to the 60s?