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.

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!)

Back in September, I gave the keynote at the University of Iowa’s clicker user conference.  Video from that keynote is now available from the University of Iowa, as is a PDF of my PowerPoint slides.  (My portion of the keynote starts at scene 8.)  I demonstrated the peer instruction method of using clickers with the audience, then shared some frameworks for making teaching choices when using clickers.

Also available from the University of Iowa is a video capture of a presentation by Megan Gogerty, adjunct assistant professor in theater arts.  She gave a very engaging presentation about her use of clickers in her course on musicals.  I’ve met very few instructors in the performing arts using clickers, so I was glad to hear about her experiences.

In October, I was one of two keynotes at the Turning Technologies National User Conference.  Knowing that the participants were already using clickers and that Eric Mazur’s keynote the day before would explore the peer instruction pedagogy very well, I skipped the peer instruction demo and went straight to talking about teaching choices.  You can view my keynote as well as Eric’s by following the link above.

A number of other conference sessions were recorded and available online now (same link).  I had to miss the first day of the conference, so I can’t speak to those sessions other than saying that some of the abstracts looked fascinating.  For instance, I’m looking forward to catching up on Timothy Dale and Joseph Foy’s presentation on applying strategies from the science of polling to writing and using clicker questions and Jerry Sarquis’ presentation on using clickers with Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL).

One session I caught on the second day of the conference was Mary Dave Blackman’s presentation on using clickers in a large music appreciation class.  As with Megan Gogerty’s presentation in Iowa, Mary Dave Blackman’s presentation provided great ideas for using clickers in a discipline that hasn’t widely adopted them.  She has her students respond to clicker questions about a piece of music while the music is playing, and in her presentation she makes a strong case that this synchronous approach has advantages over the more typical strategy of discussion a piece of music after it is over.

In a recent blog post, Dave Foord, an education consultant in the UK, describes his use of clickers in a sports science course.  The course included a leadership component and so he had each of his students lead part of a class session.  He then had the other students provide feedback, but he found that the students were hesitant to publicly criticize their peers, leaving him to be the bad guy.

One year, however, he had his students provide feedback using clickers, which allowed them to provide anonymous and thus more-honest feedback.

This had a much better effect on the learner who had lead, than me just ploughing in with critiscisms – instead I was able to pick up on the feedback from their peers, and pick out the reasons why, and what to do next time to better effect.

The use of clickers to have students assess their peers’ work (presentations, papers, works of art, performances) seems to have a lot of promise, primarily for the reason Dave points out.  A couple of months ago, I met Ray Miller, a theater and dance instructor, and he said that in the performing arts, peer critique is an important learning activity, one that could be enhanced with the use of clickers in this fashion.

Have you had students assess their peers’ work using clickers?  If so, how did it go?