Hacking the Academy is a project headed up by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  The idea is to crowdsource an edited volume in a week, which is both innovative and ambitious.  It’s a little unclear how the peer review piece of this will work at this point, but it is clear that there was only a seven-day window for contributions.

I submitted two past blog posts to Hacking the Academy: Clickers, Lecture Capture, and Event Programming (a more conceptual piece) and Backchannel in Education – Nine Uses (a more practical piece).  I wanted to submit something original, as well, so I tried my hand at video production using Jing.  I edited a PowerPoint slide deck I used in a local, face-to-face workshop this spring, then plugged in my USB microphone and recorded a voiceover to go along with the slideshow.

The result is called “Revolution or Evolution? Changing Instructional Practices in the Academy” and you can see it here:

In the video, I compare the “traditional” college lecture format to a vision of the future, one involving all three kinds of backchannel as well as a few Google jockeys.  I argue that helping instructors move from the “traditional” model to this vision of the future will require evolution, not revolution.  One might say, it will require… hacking.

This revolution versus evolution theme is one that I’ll return to this fall at the POD Network conference.  I just found out this week that my proposal for a session on this topic, submitted jointly with Jim Julius of San Diego State University and Dwayne Harapnuik of Abilene Christian University, was approved!  The Hacking the Academy project has started me thinking of ways we can hack this conference session…

Since many instructors interested in learning about teaching with clickers benefit from hearing how colleagues in their own disciplines use clickers, I’ve put together a discipline index for my book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems. By looking up your discipline in the index below, you’ll find concrete examples of teaching with clickers from faculty members whom I interviewed for my book, including in some cases example clicker questions.  I hope you find this useful!

Anthropology, 92-93

Astronomy, 16, 21, 49, 94, 118, 148, 158, 204

Biological Sciences, 10-11, 33, 66, 114, 124-125, 147, 187, 198

Chemistry, 21, 27-29, 52, 54-55, 73, 79-80, 84, 90, 104-105, 113, 114, 115-116, 118, 127, 129, 132, 147, 148, 157, 201

Communication Studies, 6-8

Earth & Environmental Sciences, 40-41, 44-45, 118, 129-130, 136, 187, 201-202, 204

Economics, 35, 112

Engineering, 52, 68, 120

English, 67, 84, 86-88, 198

Health Sciences, 41, 63-64, 73, 86, 101-102, 109-110, 129, 139, 163, 197, 201

History, 67-68, 76, 95-96, 99, 140, 198-199

Human & Organizational Development, 47, 67, 100-101, 109, 198

Language Instruction, 11-13, 17-18, 69-70, 203

Law, 80-81, 99-100, 160, 200, 203

Library Science, 82-83, 95

Mathematics, 1-3, 24, 36, 75-76, 83, 84-86, 108, 111-112, 115, 118, 120, 129-130, 133, 158

Nursing, 147

Pharmacy, 91-92

Philosophy, 22, 45-46, 81-82, 92, 119, 127, 137, 141, 148, 202

Physics, 15, 17, 61-62, 78-79, 118, 122-123, 125

Political Science, 42, 159, 199

Psychology, 21, 23, 25, 30-31, 35, 44, 89, 97, 110-111, 115, 116-117, 129-130, 139, 140, 149, 189-191, 198, 200

Sociology, 107

Veterinary Medicine, 18-20, 79, 190-191

I wanted to share a couple of reviews my book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, has received in the year since it’s been available.  There may be other reviews, but these are the two that I’ve seen.

In the Winter 2010 issue of The Review of Higher Education, Jane Freed of Central College and co-author of Learned-Centered Assessment on College Campuses, reviewed the book.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

Bruff convinces me that there are several advantages in using this technology… If the focus of classroom response systems remains on creating active learning environments, then Derek Bruff’s book adds to the on-going conversation about engaging students in their own learning.

Freed also raises an interesting concern: Does teaching with clickers place too much focus on finding the right answers and not enough on focus on helping students learn to ask useful questions?  She writes, “Learning how to navigate successfully through life is often based on knowing what questions to ask.”

This is a valid concern.  In most instances of teaching with clickers, the instructor is the one posing the questions, not the students.  Although, as I mentioned last week, some instructors ask their students to write clicker questions.  Freed’s concern reminds me of a limitation of teaching with clickers I’ve noted before, that they don’t allow instructors to target the “create” category in Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.

My response to both concerns is that often a clicker question isn’t the end of a learning activity, it is the beginning.  After you ask a challenging clicker question and have students think about and submit their answers, you’ve set the stage for a very productive classwide discussion of that question, a discussion that can surface reasons for and against the various answer choices as well as provide students a forum for asking their own questions about the topic at hand.  This works particularly well when the clicker question has multiple defensible answers, but this kind of exploration and question-asking can occur even when the question at hand has a single correct answer.  It’s important for instructors to remember to engage students in this kind of conversation at least some of the time when asking clicker questions.

In the most recent issue of the journal of the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), Mark Rohland of Temple University reviewed my book.  Rohland had nice things to say about the book:

This book convincingly demonstrates that clicker technology allows teachers and students to adapt quickly to emerging learning needs…  Bruff’s work is an enthusiastic, accessible, and detailed introduction for all educators interested in this popular educational technology tool.

Since this review appeared in a journal for academic advisers, Rohland points out some potential uses of clickers in group advising sessions, “such as getting student feedback about satisfaction with majors, confidence in understanding curriculum, and perceived need for advising.”  He notes that the anonymity that clickers provide students is likely to yield more honest responses from students about advising issues.

Rohland’s one criticism of my book is that many of my examples of clicker use by faculty members I interviewed illustrate very similar points and that this repetition can be distracting to the reader.  I think this is a fair criticism, particularly if one is reading the book straight through, cover-to-cover.  When I read books on teaching, particularly ones I’ve checked out from a library and not purchased, I often skim through the books, looking for passages relevant to my teaching needs at the time.  When I wrote my book, I wanted to make it helpful for someone who was just skimming it in that fashion, which meant that a little redundancy was acceptable.  I’m also aware that many instructors look for examples from their own discipline, so having a few examples from different disciplines to illustrate the same point helps make the book relevant to more readers.

To that last point, I had intended the book to have a discipline index in addition to a regular index.  When I get some time, I’m hoping to compile such a discipline index and post it here on the blog.  Let me know if that would be useful.

Writing this book, my first one but hopefully not my last one, has been a bit of an adventure.  It’s very satisfying to see positive reviews of my book such as these two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Ethan Watrall over on ProfHacker, I should write an end-of-semester blog post right about now.  I’ll go a bit further back, however, and share some highlights from the whole year…

• My book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, was published by Jossey-Bass back in February.  The book peaked briefly in the top 2000 books on Amazon, spending most of the year in the top 50,000.  As of early November, almost 2000 copies of the book had been sold.  I’m sure with the holiday buying season, that number has skyrocketed!  (It’s now a whopping 14% off on Amazon.)  Speaking of Amazon, if you’ve read the book and liked it and are so inclined, I wouldn’t mind another positive review or two on Amazon.
• I was interviewed about the book by Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The National Teaching & Learning Forum.  Each of those interviews led to a spike in book sales on Amazon, by the way, so press coverage matters when you’ve written a book.
• Thanks to the book’s release, I was invited to give a number of talks on teaching with clickers this year.  I spoke at the Abilene Christian University ConnnectEd Summit in February, the Muskegon Community College Math & Technology Workshop (from a distance) in August, the University of Iowa’s Clicker User Conference in September, the Turning Technologies National User Conference in October, and at Youngstown State University in October.  Online, I presented a Turning Technologies webinar, two three-part webinars for the TLT Group, and a webinar on engaging students through questioning for Higher Ed Hero.
• Meanwhile, I talked about clickers at a few conferences, too.  Colleagues from Carroll College and I presented a minicourse on clickers at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in DC in January, I talked about teaching statistics with clickers at the MAA Southeastern Section Conference in March, and I led a session on supporting faculty use of clickers at the POD Network Conference in Houston in October.
• I had a busy year teaching, too.  In my position, I usually teach one course each academic year.  This year it happened that I taught linear algebra in the spring semester and again in the fall semester.  Since I taught a course on the history and mathematics of cryptography this summer as an overload, that meant I taught in each of the three semesters in calendar year 2009.  And, naturally, I blogged about my use of clickers in each course: linear algebra here, here, here, and here and cryptography here and here.
• I wrote 104 blog posts in 2009 (counting this one), as well as 1,856 tweets (so far).  2009 was my first year on Twitter.  I joined back in February during the Abilene ConnectEd Summit to participate in the conference backchannel.  It took me a few weeks to get going on Twitter, but once I found some interesting people to follow, I started tweeting more and more frequently.  I’ve enjoyed participating in the Twitter community.  It’s been a great place for networking and keeping up-to-date on educational technology news.

There was more, certainly, but those are the highlights!

I’m looking forward to an exciting 2010.  I’m co-leading another minicourse at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco in January and facilitating a contributed paper session on clickers there, too.  I’m also a keynote speaker at the Nova Southeastern University Health Professions Educational Research Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale in January and at the University of Louisville’s Clickers in the Classroom Conference in June.  I have a few other things cooking for 2010, including a contribution to the POD Network’s Essays in Teaching Excellence series on encouraging deep learning with clicker questions.

Judging from activity on Twitter today, it seems a number of you haven’t yet taken off for the holidays.  However, I’m going to take the next two weeks off from blogging.  Don’t worry, I’ve already got a post in the hopper for January.  See you then.

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.

At today’s TLT Group seminar on teaching with clickers, a few of the participants were interested in advice on the vendor selection and adoption process.  Given how quickly classroom response system vendors release new hardware and software, I decided not to include in my book some kind of chart comparing the features of popular vendors.  Instead, I described several possible categories for such a chart in the hope that these categories would be a useful starting point for campuses beginning the vendor selection process.

Below you’ll find a short version of this list of categories, along with a few useful questions to ask for each category.  There’s a more detailed version in my book, but given the interest in this topic at the TLT Group seminar, I thought I would share this short version here.  Feel free to share additional factors to consider in the comments below.

Cost

• What are the costs to students for hardware or registration fees?
• What are the costs to your institution for hardware or software?
• What discounts are available if an adoption / exclusivity agreement is signed?

Hardware

• What kind of displays do the clickers have? What kinds of batteries do they use?
• How easy will it be for instructors to set-up receivers before class? How easy will it be for receivers to be permanently installed in classrooms?
• What frequencies does the system use? Radio frequencies are generally superior to infrared frequencies.

Software

• Does the software function differently when running on Macs?
• What needs to be installed on the classroom computer-the software itself or other programs such as PowerPoint?

Accessibility

• How easily can students with physical disabilities, including sensory impairments, use the system?

Registration Methods

• Can students register their clickers’ serial numbers using the local online course management system? How easy is this process for students and instructors?
• Can students register their clickers’ serial numbers during class? How easy is this process?
• Can the clickers be used fully anonymously so that not even the instructor can identify student responses?

Delivery Modes

• How does the system integrate with PowerPoint and other slideware programs? Can the instructor use a remote to control both PowerPoint and the classroom response system?
• Does the system provide a floating toolbar mode allowing instructors to display questions and answers in any way they choose?
• Does the system make it easy to ask questions on the fly during class?
• Does the system provide a student-paced mode in which students respond to questions asynchronously?

Question Formats

• Does the system permit the use of free-response questions? If so, how does the system display the results of a free-response question?
• Are other question formats possible, such as ranking questions or multiple-mark questions?

Reporting and Grading

• What kinds of reports can the system generate from clicker data?
• What options does the system provide instructors for assigning point values to questions?
• Does the system allow instructors to upload grades to the local online course management system? If so, how easy is this process to use?

I was very happy to receive in the mail several copies of my new book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems.  The book has started shipping from my publisher’s warehouse, so if you ordered a copy of the book directly from Jossey-Bass, you should be receiving it soon.  If you ordered from another vendor (like Amazon), you’ll probably receive it in another week or so.

I thanked a lot of people in the preface of my book, but I want to take the opportunity here to thank them all again.  Thanks to the almost 50 faculty members who shared their time and experiences with me during our interviews, thanks to my colleagues in the mathematics and faculty development communities who encouraged me to pursue this project, and thanks to my family for all their support during this writing of this book.