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 accompanying the article has received 13 comments!

Since clickers are mentioned in the article and in many of the comments, I thought I would weigh in here on the blog...

First, it's worth noting that Chris Dede, the Harvard University learning technologies professor interviewed for the article, doesn't make the argument that professors who don't use technology are shirking their duties. Several of those who left comments seem to think so, however. For example, here's comment #33 from Emily in NY:

"Dede does nothing in this article but set up a false dichotomy between professors committed to outdated, boring and irrelevant teaching methods and those eagerly embracing the modern technologies that contemporary students crave."

Here's the closest Dede comes to that argument, in the National Educational Technology Plan he helped draft for the US Department of Education in March:

"The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures."

Dede's arguments in the Chronicle argument are focused on motivating professors to tap into the latest research on learning and continue to improve their teaching practices over time. From the report he drafted, it's clear he thinks that technology can help with that, but he doesn't seem to be making the argument that professors who don't use technology are irresponsible, just those who stick with the same teaching methods you'd find in a classroom circa 1900. Sure, technology can be a big part of change, but many of the teaching innovations mentioned in the article (such as David Pace's work on enhancing history teaching) don't involve any technology.

Speaking of false dichotomies, however, here's one from comment #18 by user "tee_bee":

"What matters is that students learn--and a skilled teacher with a blackboard is still going to do a far better job than a bozo with some clickers and powerpoint slides."

True, a skilled teacher is going to do a better job than a bozo any day, regardless of technology. But comparing a skilled teacher to a bozo isn't really important here. Might technology (including clickers) help a skilled teacher be even more effective? Yes, that happens. And might technology help a relatively novice teacher become more effective? Yes, that happens, too. Those are the kinds of changes in teaching that are worth thinking about and encouraging, and I think that's a point that Chris Dede would agree with.

How might teaching with clickers help a good teacher be even more effective? Several comments on the Chronicle article were skeptical of clickers' potential for doing this. For example, here's what user "ikant" said in comment #21:

"I'm young, tech-savvy, and pretty unconvinced by this article. I can't speak for all fields, of course, but I'm pretty skeptical that good class discussions and quality writing in the humanities are particularly improved by clickers etc... the heart of what I do is in trying to educe questions, critical thought and excitement about books which students might previously have thought were utterly irrelevant to them, and (my evaluations indicate that) I do this very well with no particular technological bells and whistles in the classroom. Am I missing something?"

I'm glad that this instructor is capable of leading effective class discussions, foster critical thinking, and increase student motivation in the classroom. Let me clear: Doing so is entirely possible without clickers! However, not all instructors are as skilled as "ikant" appears to be and even for instructors like "ikant," it's possible that clickers would enhance an already productive classroom environment. Some examples from past blog posts:

• Case Study: Using clickers to promote critical thinking in text-based, political science courses
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach ethics in a history class
• My Thoughts: Using clickers to foster creativity and collaboration
• My Thoughts: Using clickers to teach critical thinking in the humanities

Here's a similar comment (#26 on the Chronicle site) from user "csgirl":

"The reason I don't use blogs and clickers is that they simply are not appropriate to the material I teach. Clickers in particular are useless to me - I care about the strategies my students are using to solve problems, not whether they can click the right answer in a quiz."

This is a common misconception about clickers, that they're just good for quizzing students basic conceptual understanding and recall. Here's another formulation of it, from user "chewy18" in comment #53:

"They might work well for understanding basic concepts or in preparation for recognition/recall examinations where the test question is a line long and the answer a word or two in length. What about those of us who teach upper division courses where we struggle with students who have not, until they reach senior status, even been exposed to the analytical reasoning process. Suddenly they discover that life is, after all, not a multiple choice test and developing an argument that could go either way, is a requirement. How does that appeal to the clicker technology?"

Sure, clickers work well for assessing basic conceptual understanding and factual recall, but they're useful for teaching at the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, too. Here are some more examples from past blog posts that demonstrate this:

• Case Study: Using clickers to teach difficult material in upper-division physics
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach students about plagiarism in library instructional settings
• Case Study: Using clicker questions without single correct answers in mathematics
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach nursing students to make evidence-based decisions

And for "csgirl," here's a great collection of resources on using clickers and peer instruction in computer science from Daniel Zingaro.

Finally, you can imagine how this comment (#37) from user "fizmath" made me feel:

"The teacher/physician analogy is lousy. We have real data to show that new medical tech benefits patients. You can't say the same about blogs, videoconferencing and those stupid clickers."

(This is a response to Chris Dede's analogy that teachers who don't update their teaching methods over time are akin to physicians who don't update their medical practices over time.)

Want some research? Try these studies, all of which are well designed and support the claim that clickers used in appropriate ways enhance student learning:

• Stowell & Nelson (2007) - Clickers provided instructors with more accurate assessment of student learning during class than other response methods, including a show of hands.
• Yourstone, Kraye, & Albaum (2008) - The use of clickers for end-of-class quizzes improved student exam scores by four points over the use of pencil-and-paper quizzes discussed the next day in class, likely because of the immediate feedback clickers provided to students on their learning.
• Hoesktra (2008) - Clickers helped students be more attentive during class (since they know clicker questions could be asked at any time) and participate in more meaningful ways (both before votes are submitted and after results are displayed).
• Smith et al. (2009) - Students actually learned from each other when discussing clicker questions in pairs prior to voting. They don't "simply choose the answer most strongly supported by neighbors they perceive to be knowledgeable."
• Mayer et al. (2009) - Clickers made it easier for instructors to ask their students questions during class and for students to respond to those questions, leading to improved student learning through better class discussions.

My summary for those skeptical of using clickers in the classroom: Read the literature, find out how those in your discipline are using clickers effectively, and see (preferably by experimentation) if those methods might help you to enhance your teaching, regardless of how effective you are currently as a teacher. If a classroom response system doesn't help you do your job better, then don't use one. They're not for everyone. However, don't write clickers off without first investigating their potential. They're far more useful and versatile that you might think at first.

Image: "Innovation" by Flickr user thinkpublic, Creative Commons licensed

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 popular tools cited by professors were e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching…”

While I’m an active user of blogs in my courses and I see a lot of value in wikis for student collaboration, the bit about e-textbooks and online documents doesn’t interest me that much. Those two technologies are more about content delivery than interaction. Sure, they have their uses, but they’re not as likely to lead to active learning experiences as more interactive tools.

What bugs me about this Chronicle story is that there’s no mention of classroom response systems. I mentioned this on Twitter, and a couple of people there poked fun at my tweet about this omission. Sure, I’m going to notice whether or not clickers are included in a survey like this. I did write a book about teaching with clickers, after all. However, it’s not that clickers weren’t addressed in the survey. In fact, they were listed right along with many other educational technologies as response options in the survey itself, and the publicly available report from CDW notes that 34% of institutions support the use of clickers by faculty. (More on that statistic below.)

I think what bothers me is that clickers rarely seem to rate a mention in stories like the Chronicle‘s on educational technology. Sure, e-book readers are all the rage these days and there are plenty of people in academia talking about the potential of e-textbooks. Blogs and wikis get a lot of attention, too, which is great since they are useful tools for fostering out-of-class interactions among students. But what about technologies that enhance the in-class experience for students? Yeah, I know I’m biased, but those are the technologies that I see as having the greatest potential to have a positive impact on higher ed. Why? Because what happens during class still looks a lot like it did 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. There’s great potential for growth there, and in-class, interactive technologies like classroom response systems can be a big part of that.

Back to the survey: Only 34% of IT professionals surveyed indicated that they support faculty use of clickers? That seems low to me, given that it seems that every campus I hear about has at least a couple of faculty members teaching with clickers. Perhaps at many of those places, that’s all there is: a couple of faculty members using clickers without any formal IT support. That would explain the 34% statistic.

This bothers me, too, particularly when, according to the CDW survey, 59% of IT professionals consider lecture capture technologies “essential” to the 21st century classroom. That’s just more content delivery. It doesn’t do much to increase student engagement and interaction. Yes, it’s true that students who know they can watch a lecture after class might take fewer notes and have more mental bandwith for paying attention and engaging during class. And lecture capture tools that allow students to collaboratively mark-up and share lectures after class have a lot of potential for outside-of-class interaction and learning. But why not put some more support behind a technology like clickers that’s designed to support formative assessment and student engagement during class?

Image: “Overhead Projectors at US Grant High School in Oklahoma City” by Flickr user Wesley Fryer / Creative Commons licensed. I’ve been wanting to use this image for a while now. What we consider an essential classroom technology one year can be a recycling challenge the next!

Last fall, a reporter from my local ABC affiliate was interested in doing a story on clickers.  He ended up interviewing me and capturing some footage in my linear algebra class.  I recorded the local news for the next few days, but I never saw the story.  A week later, a student in the class who is from Nashville said that her mother (or perhaps her grandmother) had seen the story on one of the late night news broadcasts.  So it did indeed air; I just missed it.  Flash-forward to last month, when Turning Technologies put the news story online as part of a collection of video testimonials about teaching with clickers.  I finally got to see the story, and now you can, too.  I wasn’t kidding about my 30 seconds of fame–the story is about that long.

Even though this piece was incredibly short, the reporter highlighted a few important points about using clickers, points that aren’t always addressed in news items on clickers.  The tag line for the story was “Teachers engage students with new device,” which hit the engagement aspect of using clickers I like to emphasize.  Also, the sound bite from my interview that they used was the one focusing on agile teaching, which is another important piece of teaching with clickers.

Image: “Zenith Television Set, 1977” by Flickr user Roadsitepictures / Creative Commons licensed

As I mentioned in yesterday’s  post, I’ve been thinking about some of the ways that teaching with clickers taps into the participatory culture many of us now live in.  I’ve blogged in the past about ways clickers have been used in non-academic settings, particularly in community meetings, to identify areas of consensus and foster understanding of others.  Here’s another use to add to that collection, from the blog of the UK division of the audience response system Qwizdom:

London. 30^th March 2010. The people of Tower Hamlets have been using Qwizdom’s Audience Response System to vote interactively on how to best allocate council resources.

In a series of eight public meetings, members of this community voted on how to spend £2.4 million in the “You Decide!” participatory budget process.  Results of the votes were displayed on-screen for meeting participants for added transparency and community building.

Residents voted for more police officers, handyperson services for older people, youth projects, street lights, park improvements and many other items.

I’m impressed with this initiative, particularly in the amount of funds allocated through this process.  It also removes the “representative” from “representative democracy” in a helpful way, I think.  I would imagine this was a success with community residents.  They were given the opportunity to very directly express their opinions on how funds are to be spent.  I would guess that those residents who weren’t happy with the final decisions would leave the meetings with a greater understanding of their neighbors’ interests and opinions, which is likely to be helpful in the long run.

I wonder how small-group and meeting-wide discussion was handled at these meetings.  Asking community members (or students) for their opinions via clicker questions is usually most effective as a way to foster, not replace, discussion.  It’s also unclear if residents were limited to selecting one use each for the community funds or if they were encouraged to rank multiple uses.  The former voting method can be problematic at times, while the latter yields richer data on community interests.

For my non-UK readers: The title of the Qwizdom blog post is “Strictly Come… Democracy,” which is a play on the UK television series Strictly Come Dancing.  That’s the series that spawned the American show Dancing with the Stars, in case you were wondering.  Also, when composing in WordPress, click on the icon with the capital letter omega on it to insert a £ in your post!

Image: “VOTE” by Flickr user Theresa Thompson / Creative Commons licensed

I was quoted this morning in “At Universities, Is Better Learning a Click Away?“, an Associated Press story on the future of classroom response systems by AP reporter Eric Gorski.  The story features Michael Dubson, who teaches physics with clickers at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  CU-Boulder, and its physics education research group in particular, has been very active in the world of clickers (including contributing to these great videos), and I was glad to hear Michael Dubson’s perspectives on the technology in the AP piece.

CU-Boulder is an i>clicker campus, and Dubson makes the case in the AP story that a simple, dedicated clicker device is preferable in most instances to more flexible systems based on smart phone apps.  Indeed, i>clicker devices have only six buttons–an on/off button and buttons labeled A, B, C, D, and E.  This is a very simple system, but, as inventor Tim Stelzer argued at the Louisville clicker conference back in 2008, multiple-choice questions with five answer choices work very well for the kinds of formative assessment and peer instruction many instructors use clickers to implement.

Gorski places me on the other side of a somewhat-artificial divide:

Derek Bruff, assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, said simple clickers are great at multiple choice questions. But he’s more excited about using smart phones, which allow students to ask questions of instructors, hold back-channel discussions with each other and respond in their own words.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m definitely excited by the possibilities of using smart phones as “super-clickers” or to facilitate backchannel discussion in the classroom.  It’s true that I’m more excited by smart-phone systems than I am by simple clickers like i>clicker, but that’s largely because I’ve been involved in teaching with clicker with several years and I’m eager to leverage that experience to consider new kinds of technology-facilitated classroom dynamics.  (For one thoughtful perspective on those potential dynamics, consider Sean Seepersad’s recent post on moving away from clickers.  I hope to blog about Sean’s post soon!)

I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about the pedagogy of multiple-choice questions (while writing my book, blogging about clickers here, and giving talks on the subject around the country), and I think the multiple-choice format is often underrated.  I even have an article coming out (soon, I hope!) titled, “Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning with Clickers.”  So I definitely get where Michael Dubson is coming from: Five-answer multiple-choice clicker questions are incredibly useful in all kinds of courses.

All this to say that one of the principles I attempted to uphold when writing my book was that everyone’s teaching context is different–different students, different disciplines, different institutions, different teaching styles and experiences.  I’m interested in helping instructors think more intentionally about their teaching choices, exploring the pros and cons of choices both traditional and innovative.  So while I may be more excited myself about smart phone systems, I always encourage instructors to select technologies and teaching practices that make the most sense in their particular teaching contexts.

I’m glad for clickers to receive the attention of the Associated Press.  The story has been all over Twitter today, and I hope it makes its way into print and online newspapers across the country.  And I’m glad that I could help Eric Gorski out as he was researching this story.  Eric also contributed to a short video piece to accompany his article, and he blogged about the story on the AP’s Facebook page.

Thoughts on the AP story?

Image: “The Nabla System (Forgotten Seed)” by Flickr user Syntopia

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.

Clyde Herreid of the University of Buffalo’s National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science has received a $500,00 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the use of clicker questions in case studies used in biology classes, with a particular focus on students’ emotional engagement with science.  (The University of Buffalo seems to be a happening place for clickers.  I mentioned their School of Dentistry’s use of classroom response systems on Monday.)  I haven’t blogged about the use of clickers in case studies yet, but I mentioned the practice in my book, citing Herreid’s paper on the topic (Herreid, 2006) as well as Peggy Brickman’s clicker-enhanced case study on DNA fingerprinting.

I’m glad to see an investigation of this pedagogy receive such a sizable grant, particularly given its emphasis on the affective domain.  However, the press release describes students using clickers like a game show buzzer, which is a bit misleading, now that I think about it.  On Jeopardy, for instance, only the fastest responder is allowed to answer, but when using clickers all students have a chance to weigh in.

Meanwhile, the Faculty Technology Center at Louisiana State University recently hosted a presentation on teaching with clickers by biological sciences professor Steve Pomarico.  Pomarico noted that before using clickers in his 250-student course, attendance would vary from 60% to 30% on any given day.  Now that he uses clickers and awards participation points for students responding to his clicker questions, attendance is never below 65%.  He notes that merely using clickers to take attendance is a poor choice, however.  Asking questions that let students test their understanding and provide instructors with useful feedback on student learning is a better use of the technology.

• Herreid, C. F. (2006). “Clicker” cases: Introducing case study teaching into large classrooms. Journal of College Science Teaching, 36(2), 43-4.

University of British Columbia professor of earth and ocean sciences Roland Stull recently gave his popular course on the science of storms a clicker makeover.  Persuaded by research from Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative at UBC, he now structures his class sessions around conceptual understanding clicker questions, using a version of the standard peer instruction technique.  Stull has his students read their textbook and respond to online quiz questions the night before class.  He has a TA analyze their answers for common areas of confusion, then adjusts his plans for class to address those areas.  Stull notes a variety of benefits to this teaching approach:

“It’s a lot more fun for me to teach the class,” Stull said in an interview in his UBC office. “Not only are the students interacting with themselves, but they are much more willing to ask me questions during class.”

The Georgia Straight article about Stull’s use of clickers quotes Alan Webb, a University of Waterloo accounting professor who published a study ostensibly showing that teaching with clickers actually decreases student participation in class.  However, as I noted in my review of this study, what Webb actually showed was that indicating the correct answer to a clicker questions prior to class discussion of the question decreases student participation.

At the University of Buffalo School of Dentistry, instructors John Maggio and Chester Gary have students respond to questions during class using their laptops as response devices.  The school requires students to have laptops so they can access electronic textbooks, so using “virtual clicker” software on student laptops makes sense.  Maggio finds that his students have rather short attention spans, so he uses clicker questions to keep them engaged during his 90-minute classes, asking as many as twelve questions per class.  The frequent questions and the fact that some are graded on accuracy (not just effort) keep his students from using their laptops to distract themselves.

Just like Roland Stull at UBC, John Maggio says that his clicker questions have increased participation in his class:

“They raise their hands much more often, they’re discussing things much more, they’re participating more than they ever have,” [Maggio] says, noting that his classes featured very little discussion or debate before the introduction of the audience-response technology.

One of the criticisms I often hear about teaching with clickers is that doing so gives shy students an excuse not to summon the courage to speak out in class.  These two news articles would indicate that’s not the case, after all.

Note: I’ve had a couple of problems with this blog recently–the RSS feed stopped working and I haven’t had any time to post.  I’ve now fixed both problems.

I’m a huge fan of the World’s Technology Podcast from the BBC and PRI.  Clark Boyd puts together a great collection of technology stories from around the world every week–not the usual stories about the latest gadgets, but stories about how technology is impacting society and culture around the world.  Great stuff.

A couple of months back Clark ran a story on Chinese students using cell phones to cheat.  I tweeted Clark and suggested that he take a look at some of the positive ways teachers are using cell phones in the class room.  I recommended he take a look at what Greg Kulowiec has been doing in his 9th grade history classes in Massachusetts.  I’ve blogged about Greg’s use of Poll Everywhere, and Greg’s posted a great video showing how he uses this text-messaging-based response system to ask his students ethical questions about the Holocaust.

Well, Clark Boyd took me up on my recommendation and interviewed Greg about his use of technology in his classes.  The interview ran near the beginning of episode 256 of Clark’s podcast.  Greg talks about how he had his students use their cell phones during class to call people they knew and quiz them about the US Constitution and how he uses his students’ cell phones as part of a classroom response system to engage them during class.

Greg also describes a couple of ways to leverage his students’ cell phones’ camera functions.  He had his students take photos during a class trip to the New England Aquarium and send them to Greg’s Evernote account for later use in an Animoto video, for instance.  He also plans to have his students create their own Evernote accounts so they can take photos of references as they do research, send those photos to their Evernote accounts, and use Evernote’s tagging ability to organize their research notes.  Very cool stuff.  I think it’s time I signed up for an Evernote account.

Props to Clark Boyd for being open to listener suggestions and to Greg Kulowiec for being willing to share his innovative uses of technology.  You can follow Greg’s continuing experiments on his blog, The History 2.0 Classroom.

Okay, so “Classrooms Go High-Tech to Engage Students” isn’t the most creative headline, but it was nice to see some coverage of educational technologies of interest to me in US News & World Reports recently.  One theme of the article is that students are going to use technology during class, so instructors might as well put that technology to good use.  Another theme is captured by this quote:

Professors are not so much people who stand and spout facts with students taking notes, said [Glenn Platt, professor of interactive media studies at Miami University]. The Internet has all of the information. And students aren’t going to come to class for a lecture if it’s on a podcast.  So that means many instructors are trying to make the classroom more interactive.

Each theme seems a bit of a downer: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and “Kids these days!” (shakes fist like the neighbor in the Dennis the Menace comics).  I’m exaggerating, of course, but I think it’s worth pointing out that many instructors who use technology in the classroom aren’t catering to students.  Many are excited to find ways to create more interactive, dynamic, engaging classrooms.  Students learn best when they are actively engaged in the learning process.  Some students can be so engaged during a classic college lecture, but many don’t learn best that way.  (It’s worth noting that many of those who do learn well that way go on to careers like, say, college professors, so relying on our personal learning experiences to determine our teaching practices can be a bit misleading.)

Here’s another kind of “Kids these days!” quote:

“Technology is such an inherent part of their lives,” [Gary Rudman, GTR Consulting,] said. “They have come to expect it every step of the way. When they come to college, they are expecting this technology to be incorporated into their learning.”

I’ll have to take Mr. Rudman at his word, since he’s doing research on this topic.  I would argue that at least some students don’t expect technology to be used in interactive ways in the classroom.  Some students are expecting to come to class, listen and take notes, make sense of their notes after class, then write some version of their notes on the test.  Having students actively engage with each other during class (via clicker questions, Twitter backchannel, and so on) can throw some students off.  Most of them, however, come around to like a more interactive classroom.

I should also mention something I’ve many times from those who have had a while to think about Mark Prensky’s “digital native” idea: Students are quite used to using technology in their daily lives, but are often not used to using technology to learn.  They’re also not used to thinking critically about how they use technology.  (And, yes, I’m providing my own version of “Kids these days!” here…)

A few other highlights from the US News article include a brief description of the in-class backchannel used by Scott McLeod, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Iowa State; a mention of Livescribe Inc.’s Pulse smartpen, one device I’d like to get to know better; a brief update on the state of e-textbooks; and one student’s tough time with blogging for her classes:

Chelsea Nuffer, 21, a performance and communications major at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., said blogging for four classes was overwhelming and she ran out of things to write about. “It works for students who might not speak up in class,” she said. “For me, I’m pretty vocal.”

When the communications majors start complaining about having too much blogging, then you know that student blogging has gone mainstream!