Earlier this month, David Clemens, who teaches literature at Monterey Peninsula College, authored a post titled “The Data-Driven Classroom” on the National Association of Scholars (NAS) blog.  In his satirical post, Clemens he refers to clickers as “the future of edubiz:”

Clickers generate tsunamis of admin’s holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable.

His post goes on in this tone, satirizing those who use technology for technology’s sake.  (He includes a few shots at the use of PowerPoint and hyperlinked texts.)  I objected to his characterization of clickers as primarily used to generate assessment data for administrators, so I left a couple of comments on the post, arguing that clickers are primarily used to engage students during class, not to generate data for administrators.

David Clemens then wrote a follow-up post, “Reply to Bruff,” on the NAS blog.  In this post, he asserts the following:

Students urgently need unmediated classrooms and Exemplary-level teachers [those who model critical reasoning for students] who through Socratic dialogue and shared inquiry develop independent, informed, and original minds.

He argues that clickers (and PowerPoint and student learning objectives) don’t help teachers meet this goal.  Since I believe they do and that the useful effects of clickers are frequently underestimated in the humanities, I posted a lengthy comment elaborating on my earlier comments on the NAS blog.  You can read Dr. Clemens’ posts by following the links above.  Below you’ll find my response.

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!

Maybe this is obvious to others, but I hadn’t thought of this particular use of numeric-response clicker questions, shared with me by a humanities professor recently: In a class that deals with history, ask students to identify the year in which a particular event happened using a numeric-response clicker question.

This question type is typically used in math and science classes to have students respond with their answers to open-ended computational questions, but it can just as easily be used in a humanities class to have students respond with dates (e.g. 1776, 2010).  Sure, one could ask students to respond to a multiple-choice date question, but the free-response format might surface some wrong answers you wouldn’t predict.

This kind of question isn’t limited to events, of course.  You could also ask students to identify the year a piece of literature was written or an artwork was created.  This type of question need not be a factual recall question, either.  You could present to students a piece of art, for instance, they haven’t likely seen before and ask them to analyze the artwork and estimate when it was created.

Some classroom response systems allow you to set a range for the correct answer to a numeric-response question.  With that feature, you could give students a little wiggle room in their answers (“To within 5 years, in what year did X occur?”) or have them respond to the nearest decade.

(By the way, I’ve just signed up for the twitterfeed service, so a tweet about this post should automatically appear in my Twitter stream in the next hour.  Fingers crossed!)

My last couple of blog posts here have focused on pedagogical possibilities of a class full of students with smart phones or laptops.  While I’m excited by those possibilities, I also think it’s worth considering some of the more practical aspects of using mobile devices in the classroom.  Jason B. Jones, who teaches English at Central Connecticut State University, recently shared on the Prof. Hacker blog his experience teaching a summer course in which every student was given an iPod Touch.  His “lessons learned” focused mostly on practical issues:

• Plan to deal with access issues.  For instance, some of his students didn’t have their own computers, making it difficult for them to sync their iPod Touches with new content.
• Don’t assume that your students are as tech savvy as you might think they are.  As D. Askey said in the comments on Jason’s post, “The ability to use Facebook adeptly does not indicate technical or Internet savvy in any way whatsoever.”
• On the other hand, students can come up with uses you might not consider.  Make sure you learn from their ingenuity.
• Jason’s campus network didn’t allow peer-to-peer wireless connections, which rendered some of the apps he wanted to use inoperative.  Watch out for network issues like this.
• If you’re lending devices to students for a course, make sure you have a plan for getting them back at the end of the semester!

Are you experimenting with using mobile devices in the classroom?  If so, what lessons have you learned?

I’m always a little surprised when I run into college teachers who haven’t heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  For some strange reason, I’ve known about it since fourth grade.  (Mrs. Orchard also introduced me to Greek mythology, Spanish, and a variety of other interesting topics.)  However, I’ve found that many instructors aren’t familiar with the taxonomy, which is a shame since it provides such a useful framework for thinking about the questions we ask of our students.

The original 1956 taxonomy by Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six educational objectives: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  There’s a lesser known 2001 revision of the taxonomy that I find a little more useful than the original (which is why I used it my book).  In the revision, the objectives are described using verbs: recall, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.

I recently found a couple of Web sites that use the taxonomy to provide guidance for writing clicker questions.  The Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR) center at the Ohio State University has a great site on teaching with clickers, one that includes advice for designing clicker questions using the 1956 taxonomy.  Here’s their example of a “synthesis” question, one that asks students to “put parts together to form a new whole”:

If Homer wrote The Iliad today, Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom would argue, respectively, whether the work should be classified as:

1. Existential vs. romantic
2. Postmodern vs. classical
3. Modern vs. romantic
4. Postcolonial vs. modern
5. Preliterate vs. postliterate

This question requires students to know something about The Iliad as well as Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom’s approaches to critical theory.  I think this is a great example of a clicker question that calls for higher-level thinking, one that would work well in a literature course.

The e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University has a similar set of advice for designing clicker questions.  They apparently used the TELR page as a model and thus also used the 1956 taxonomy.  Interestingly, their sample questions are all from the field of archaeology.  (Now that I think about it, Mrs. Orchard included archaeology in my fourth-grade curriculum, too.)  Here’s their example of a “synthesis” question:

We recently excavated a site in northeastern Arizona with a small 6 – 8 room roomblock, tusayan black-on-white pottery, and a small kiva. Nearby we found prehistoric rock alignments in association with large multi-use bifaces suggesting the area was used as an agricultural fields. What kind of site is this?

1. Pueblo II Anasazi
2. Pueblo II Mogollon
3. Basketmaker II

Answer:  A. Pueblo II Anasazi. The Anasazi were the prehistoric archaeological culture that lived small roomblocks, made tusayan black-on-white pottery, and lived in northeastern Arizona.

This looks like a great question, but I might dispute its categorization as a “synthesis” question.  Whereas the TELR example above clearly requires students to put ideas together, this question seems to require students to know the characteristics of three kinds of archaeological sites, which is more of a “comprehension” question as I see it.

Agreeing on how to categorize a question using Bloom’s Taxonomy isn’t always easy.  At a conference back in 2007, Shelley Smith from the University of Minnesota-Duluth led a session on writing clicker questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a framework.  She shared several example questions with those of attending the session, then asked us to categorize each question according to the taxonomy (using clickers, naturally).  It was very interesting to see how much discussion this activity generated, as many of us enthusiastically debated how to categorize the questions.

Nailing down categories isn’t the ultimate point of using Bloom’s Taxonomy when writing clicker questions, however.  The point is to take advantage of some framework (the 1956 taxonomy, the 2001, some other taxonomy) to help us think about the questions we ask our students and thus be more intentional about aligning our questions with our learning objectives.

Having led a number of workshops for faculty new to using clickers at my home institution and elsewhere, I was looking forward to the chance to lead a workshop for faculty with more experience teaching with classroom response systems at the clickers conference in Louisville the other weekend.  I knew I wanted an interactive session that helped participants share their experiences using clickers with each other and helped them see new ways they might make use of clickers.

I based the main activity in my session on one that Shelley Smith of the University of Minnesota at Duluth led at a session at the 2007 POD Network conference.  Since I developed something of a taxonomy of clicker questions during the process of writing my book, one featuring types of questions as well as types of activities commonly used with clickers, I had participants in my session at Louisville first write about a particularly effective use of clickers from their own teaching experience.  Then I described my taxonomy using examples drawn from my book.  (Thanks to Edna Ross, whom I interviewed for my book, who was present to share her story about using clickers to generate “times for telling.”)  Next I had participants use my taxonomy to categorize the clicker uses they had earlier described in writing.  I then asked a couple of participants share their uses of clickers with the whole group.  After each of these participants did so, I asked the other participants to categorize what was described according to my taxonomy and submit their categorizations using clickers.

As happened with Shelley Smith’s session at POD, this activity generated useful discussion about the ways in which instructors use clicker questions.  This was the first time I used this activity in a workshop, and it went very well.  (Shelley used Bloom’s Taxonomy in her activity, and she brought with her questions written by faculty members in various disciplines at her home institution instead of having participants write about their own uses of clickers.)

One participant shared a use of clickers she heard about from a colleague in the English Department at her institution.  He first posed a clicker question that asked his students to voice their opinion on the death penalty–did they support it or not.  Then he read a poem about a prisoner on death row.  Following the poem, he asked his students to respond again to the opinion question about the death penalty.  The results of the second question were different from the results of the first question, which not only provided the instructor and students with a view into student opinions, but also showed to the students the power of poetry to affect change in people’s perspectives.  (I didn’t catch the name of the participant who shared this story.  If you know who it was, please let me know.)

Ken Jones of the University of Texas at San Antonio shared a way in which he has used clickers in the past.  He first asked the students in his course if they would be willing to commit some particular breach of business ethnics.  (I forget the particular breach.  It was something about sharing private information, I think.)  Most of the students said they wouldn’t.  He then asked them if they would do so for some amount of money.  A few students said they would.  Ken then asked them the same question several times, each time increasing the amount of money.  More and more students said that they would take the money.

As with the poetry example above, Ken’s use of clickers revealed to him and his students something about his students’ perspectives and set the stage for a productive discussion of the topic at hand.  Both examples also generated productive discussion at my session regarding the multiple purposes instructors often have for using clicker questions.

After this activity, I asked participants which types of questions and activities they used most frequently in their teaching.  Conceptual understanding and application questions were the most popular, each chosen by about a third of the participants.  Student perspective questions came in third, chosen by 10% of the participants.

The activities most frequently used with clickers were uncovering student learning (chosen by 32% of participants), evaluating student learning (21%), generating small-group discussion (21%), and generating classwide discussion (16%).  Disciplinary differences were rather strong on this question.  Of those in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), 88% indicated they used clickers foremost to uncover or evaluate student learning.  None indicated that their primary use was to generate small-group or classwide discussion.  The responses from those in the humanities were just the opposite–none used clickers primarily to uncover or evaluate student learning and all of them indicated that they use clickers mainly to generate small-group or classwide discussion.

This was a non-scientific survey, of course, but I found these disciplinary differences interesting.  I know that a few of the larger campus studies of clicker use looked at the various ways that faculty use clickers.  I’ll have to see if these discipline-specific findings are consistent with those larger studies.

Thanks to those who participated in my session last weekend.  My only regret is that I didn’t collect what the participants wrote about their uses of clickers.  Had I done so, I could have shared those with the participants over email.  Next time!

Reference: Jenkins, A. (2007). Technique and technology: Electronic voting systems in an English literature lecture. Pedagogy, 7(3), 526-533.

Summary: In this article, Alice Jenkins of Glasgow University in Scotland describes her use of clickers to teach an undergraduate poetry class with 110 students. Her primary use of clickers was for formative assessment immediately following a portion of a lecture on a particular topic, leading into “agile” teaching and class-wide discussion. Types of questions included the following:

• Application Questions – In the article, Jenkins focuses on using clickers to teach students metrical analysis of poems. She provides an example of this type of question, asking students to predict certain properties of the next line of a given poem, as well as an analysis of student responses to her example question.
• Critical Thinking Questions – She mentions asking her students “to assess certain formal qualities of poems” using a Likert scale and to choose an adjective that best describes a poem’s diction.

Jenkins also makes an interesting point about the use of the “hand-raising” method of answering questions in class. She asserts that this method works better for questions with two possible answers, since students can be asked to raise their hands for one answer and keep their hands down for the other answer. This allows students to answer a little more independently than the usual method of asking for a show of hands for each answer choice sequentially. However, she also mentions that non-participating students confuse the results here, since their lack of raised hands would be interpreted as “votes” for one of the two answer choices.

Jenkins is also fond of the “I don’t know” option (which isn’t possible with binary “hands-up” questions) since it discourages students from voting randomly (useful presumably because it encourages students to ask themselves, “How confident am I in this answer?”) and provides Jenkins with a sense of the difficulty level of a given question.

Jenkins was observed by a colleague during the classes in which she used clickers. The colleague reported that Jenkins had “asked for and received oral responses from the students 28 times.” Jenkins said she was “astonished” to hear this, presumably because this high level of interaction was unusual for this large course.

Jenkins also surveyed her students about the use of clickers. One interesting result was that 60% of her students said they “worked out the answers to all the questions” when clickers were used, versus only 10% without clickers. The primary uses of clickers students identified as beneficial were (a) helping students assess their own understanding, (b) allowing for anonymous responses, (c) helping the instructor assess student learning, and (d) increasing participation.

Commentary: This is the first published article I’ve found describing the use of clickers in a humanities class, so I was pretty excited to discover it. (Stuart, Brown, and Draper (2004), also from Glasgow University, describe the use of clickers in a philosophical logic course, but that kind of course is fairly unusual in the humanities.) I think there’s a lot of potential for the use of clickers in the humanities, and the interesting application and critical thinking questions Jenkins describes in this article are great examples of that potential. I hope that this article encourages others in the humanities to consider using clickers.

One of the reasons I think that instructors in the humanities have difficulty seeing value in the use of clickers is that their experience with multiple-choice questions is based on the use of such questions on exams, where they are usually factual questions. Asking these kinds of questions in class with clickers isn’t usually particularly exciting or useful, so I can understand why humanities instructors might not see value in clickers.

However, one can use clickers to ask “one-best-answer” questions that encourage critical thinking. For these questions, students are asked to choose from several answers, more than one of which has some merit. The point of these kinds of questions isn’t to find out if students can identify the “right” answer, since there are no “right” answers. Instead, the point is to engage students in a question (by asking all students to think about the question independently and commit to an answer) to lead into a rich class-wide discussion of the material. These kinds of “one-best-answer” questions don’t work well on exams (unless one requests that students defend their choices, I guess), but they can work very well in class.

Finally, I think it’s really interesting that 60% of Jenkins’ students said they thoughtfully considered questions asked via clickers versus 10% who said they would do so for questions not asked via clickers. I’m reminded of a student of Elizabeth Barkley‘s captured in a video Elizabeth shared at a conference I attended. In commenting on the Think-Pair-Share collaborative learning technique, the student said something like, “With Think-Pair-Share, I know I’m going to have to pair up and share my thoughts on a question, so I think about the question. If I know I’m not going to ‘pair’ or ‘share,’ then why should I ‘think’?” Jenkins’ survey results support this assertion!