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…

Sunday night, I delivered the opening keynote at Central Michigan University’s Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning.  My presentation was titled “Class Time Reconsidered: Motivating Student Participation and Engagement.”  My goal was to share some frameworks and strategies for engaging students in the classroom by taking a few common assumptions about teaching and learning and flipping them on their heads.  Here’s my Prezi, complete with much flipping of things on their heads:

Some thoughts on the presentation:

One of my first clicker questions asked participants to identify a key challenge in motivating students to engage meaningfully during class.  Strangely, the even-numbered answer choices were by far the most popular-students are hesitant to speak up in front of their peers, students focus too much on grades and not enough on learning, and students don’t prepare adequately for class.  These results worked well for me, since I had been planning on addressing ways to reach students who are risk-averse or grade-focused and ways to motivate students to prepare for class in useful ways.

Participants engaged in a Think-Pair-Share activity in which they tried to identify six steps in a typical process their students might undertake to learn in their course.  This followed an introduction to the idea of a “time for telling,” so I asked participants to make sure that “telling” wasn’t the first step on their lists.  I also encouraged participants to force themselves to come up with six steps.  Coming up with three-step plans (take notes during class, figure things out in the homework, regurgitate on exams) is too easy.  Identifying a six-step process means you have think a little more intentionally about how your students learn.

Given the clicker question results indicating that lack of student preparation is a big challenge, we camped out for a while on the idea of a pre-class assignment.  I made two important points about these assignments: they should be graded, if only on effort, so that students will take them seriously and you should make use of these assignments in some way during class.  Otherwise students will see them as busywork, not connected with the “real” work of the course.  One participant shared her approach-she has students create outlines of their pre-class readings, then share and compare their outlines in small groups during class.

Monday morning (the day after my presentation), I saw on the book raffle table that there’s a new book on Just-in-Time Teaching, Just in Time Teaching: Across the Disciplines and Across the Academy,  edited by Scott Simkins and Mark Maier (Stylus, 2010).  I wish I had known that Sunday night-I would have mentioned it during that section of my presentation!

My third and final clicker question asked participants to identify one of five in-class engagement strategies they wanted to try soon.  While I wasn’t intending the presentation as a pitch for clickers, perhaps my biases couldn’t be hidden-clickers was the number one answer!  This result might have also been because clickers are new and different, but not so different as to require a complete rethinking of one’s teaching approach.  I’m convinced that the return on investment for teaching with clickers is high-one can make small changes in one’s teaching methods that yield significant results.

At the end of the presentation, I had the participants generate questions for me at their tables.  Most of the tables had at least one person with a Web-enabled device (such as the iPads several of the CMU staff hosting the event were sporting).  They used these to submit their tables’ questions via Google Moderator.  I asked them to vote on other tables’ questions, as well, providing me with a ranked list of the most popular questions.  This served as a reasonable demo of Google Moderator as a backchannel tool, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to address the questions that emerged through this process.  My plan is to address the more popular questions with Google Moderator since, as the creator of this Moderator session, I can leave comments on individual questions.  You can see the questions submitted by the group here.

The conference continues through Tuesday morning.  I was able to attend most of the conference on Monday, and I live-tweeted a couple of the sessions.  You can read my tweets here.  Joy Mighty of Queen’s University in Ontario delivered the Monday lunch keynote, and she made a strong case that by not paying attention to matters of diversity in our classroom, we run the risk of fostering inequity.  It was a thought-provoking keynote for me.

Thanks to Central Michigan University for having me as part of their conference and for some great conversations about student engagement!

I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this, but back in 2008 three University of California-Berkeley students, Sohyeong Kim, Nathan Gandomi, and Kate Smith, prototyped an interesting kinesthetic classroom response system they called Students on the Move.  Instead of clickers (or smart phones, etc.) students were given joysticks.  They were told to push their joysticks forward if they felt the lecture should pick up the pace and to pull their joysticks backward if they were confused and thought the instructor should slow down.  These feedback data were visualized on the instructor’s computer screen as a sequence of circles, one for each student.  As a student pushed forward on the joystick, that student’s circle would move upward and turn green.  As the student pulled back, the circle would move downward and turn red.  More details and some photos can be found in the students’ project report [PDF].

The idea of opening up a backchannel for students to give this kind of one-dimensional feedback (speed up / slow down) isn’t new.  Turning Technologies’ “moment to moment” feature does something similar, producing a moving line graph that shows the average student response on, say, a scale of 1 to 5 to a question.  The line graph updates in real time as long as the slide stays on the screen.  You might have seen something similar during the 2008 US presidential elections, when CNN would aggregate the reactions of likely voters during certain presidential debates using a similar system.

You can also generate similar data using i>clicker if you leave visible the results display when voting is open.  For example, in my book I profile Adam Rich, who teaches biology at SUNY-Brockport.  He’ll give students a clicker question using i>clicker and have students respond and change their responses throughout a class discussion of the question.  He’ll monitor the current voting results on the i>clicker base unit during this time and keep the discussion going until the results indicate the students have reached consensus on the correct answer.

While the idea behind Students on the Move isn’t new, these students’ implementation of the idea has some very creative elements.  Using a joystick as the response device creates a more kinesthetic experience for the student than they get with a clicker.  Moreover, the joystick lets you treat student feedback as a continuous variable, instead of the discrete one that’s produced by clicker-based systems.  That is, instead of having students respond with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you can have students respond with any real number between 1 and 5 for a richer set of responses.  I don’t know of any other classroom response systems that provide this kind of continuous data.

The joystick has another useful feature–it returns to its neutral state when it’s not pushed forward or pulled back.  I’ve talked to a few researchers interested in this kind of backchannel tool, and one of their concerns was that students would forget to change their response back to neutral after indicating a more extreme response.  The joystick handles that problem nicely, resulting in fewer of what the Berkeley students call “false positives.”  (It doesn’t handle one of these researchers’ other concerns: the challenge of prompting students to respond as appropriate without interrupting the flow of the lesson.)

The other key innovation here is the visualization of the aggregate data.  Instead of using a line graph or a bar chart, Students on the Move produces this very interesting set of circles that float up and down and change color as students provide feedback.  I don’t know if it’s necessary to change both position and color as students respond, since both visual elements are conveying the same information, but I like the creativity in this idea.  I can imagine that watching most of the circles drop to the bottom of the screen during a tough part of a lecture is fairly dramatic.

The Berkeley students assert in their project report that “traditional” classroom response systems are designed for teachers, not students:

Although many studies show the positive effect of a CRS, some studies demonstrate that students feel stressed and frustrated by being constantly assessed. Our study and interviews indicate that this negativity is due to the fact that these classroom response systems are mainly designed for teachers. We argue that classroom response systems should be redesigned to include the needs of students, as well as the instructors, in order to best benefit both.

It’s true that some instructors use classroom response systems just to give quizzes and take attendance, but as I’ve argued here before, using clickers just to monitor students is problematic (for the reasons the Berkeley students note above) and instructors who do so miss out on some of a classroom response system’s key benefits–student engagement and “agile teaching.”  On the other hand, many instructors use clickers to engage students in meaningful explorations of course content and practice “agile teaching” by altering the course of a lesson based on student feedback.  In the hands of these instructors, I would argue that clickers are very useful to the students as well as to the instructor.

I think perhaps that the real difference between a “traditional” system and one like Students on the Move is that in a traditional classroom response system, the instructor is the one who opens voting.  With Students on the Move (and the other, similar systems mentioned above), the students can respond whenever they like.  The feedback generated is student-paced, not instructor-paced in a sense.  That distinction is why I would classify Students on the Move as a backchannel system, and I’m begun to think of backchannel systems as complementary to more instructor-paced systems.  I see comments from time to time indicating that having students engage in backchannel conversations (say via Twitter) during class can be a replacement for clickers.  I don’t think that’s the case, because the two kinds of classroom response systems (ones that are student-paced and ones that are instructor-paced) serve different, but complementary, functions in the classroom.

More on the relationship between backchannel and clickers later!  For now, I’ll end with a couple of questions about Students on the Move.

1. Does the system provide rich data to the instructor after class?  For instance, it would be useful to have time-stamped data available to match up with a recording of the class to determine what components of the lecture triggered particularly positive or negative reactions from students.
2. Does it make sense to show students the feedback visualization during class?  I’ve talked to a couple of i>clicker instructors who have accidentally displayed the results chart while voting was still open.  They both remarked how quickly the students converged to the same answer, like lemmings.  I wonder if Students on the Move would produce similar counterproductive behaviors.
3. How might instructors respond to this kind of feedback data during class?  That is, what kinds of “agile teaching” decisions might an instructor make?  Certainly, if most of the students say “slow down!” then it makes sense to slow down and ask students for questions.  (The Berkeley students wisely point out that their system doesn’t provide instructors with information on why students are asking for a slower pace, just how many of them are doing so.)  But what if students are split?  What then?  Or if students are asking for a faster pace, but the instructor hasn’t prepared to go that fast?

I’m glad I found out about Students on the Move.  If you can help me figure out how I found out about it, I would appreciate it!  Also, if you know of anything that resulted from this student project beyond the fall 2008 semester, please let me know.

Image: “In Control” by Flickr user Steve Snodgrass / Creative Commons licensed

Over on the new Active Class blog, Sidneyeve Matrix recently discussed the idea of turning the college lecture into something like what the television industry calls “event programming.”  She did so in the context of encouraging students to come to class when the lecture is captured for later listening or watching by students.  She suggested instructors who are capturing their lectures incorporate a couple of elements to the in-class experience that aren’t replicated in the lecture capture: the use of video clips that help students remember and make sense of course content and the use of clickers for content and opinion questions.

Sidneyeve makes some great points about how the use of clickers can give students a sense of ownership over the in-class learning experience:

Clicker polls effectively personalize, customize, and socialize the class. Students know that poll results depend on who is in class that day and it is that indeterminacy that lends energy and anticipation to the lecture. Moreover, if the students see that their polling feedback is valued by the professor, and is connected to assessment, they too will value the activity of in-class participation as worthwhile.

Sidneyeve has hit upon a subtle, but important point about one of the roles that clickers (and more general classroom response systems, like backchannel tools) play in the classroom.  Using clickers turns students into co-creators, along with the instructor, of the in-class learning experience.  When the results of a clicker question are shown on-screen, something happens that would not have happened were those particular students not in the room participating that day.  Many instructors who use clickers practice what I call “agile teaching,” using the results of clicker questions to directly inform how they lead discussion or how they spend their class time.  Even when instructors don’t practice agile teaching, the results of a clicker question are still unique to the particular collection of students in the room at that time, and those results have at least some small impact on the students who view them.

Imagine the opposite, what some call “ballistic teaching,” a lesson plan that, once launched, cannot be altered by feedback from students in the room.  A video capture of this kind of lecture would be almost, if not more, valuable for students as attending this lecture in person.  Instructors considering lecture capture are often worried, as Sidneyeve points out, that students won’t come to class if lectures are placed online.  But if there’s virtually no difference between watching a lecture online and watching it from a seat in the classroom, why should students come to class?  What’s the point?

As Sidneyeve points out, including clicker questions in a lecture means that there is necessarily a difference between watching a lecture online and participating in the “live” version.  At the very least, watching a clicker question on video after the fact means that the student’s vote isn’t included in the results of the clicker question.  And if the clicker question is used to facilitate small-group or classwide discussion, then there’s even more difference–and more reason for the student to come to class and participate live!

I would like to take the television metaphor of “event programming” that Sidneyeve uses, and push it one step further.  A colleague of mine shared with me a recent Time essay by James Poniewozik titled “Twitter and TV: How Social Media Is Helping Old Media.”  In the essay, Poniewozik points out that many television viewers DVR their favorite shows to watch them later and skip the commercials.  This latter point is of particular interest to the television industry, since their revenue depends largely on advertisers.  Poniewozik argues, however, that social media like Facebook and Twitter can make certain television shows into “events” that viewers want to watch live.  He points to the live discussions that occurred online during the recent Winter Olympics and Academy Awards.  Participating in these live discussions was an incentive for people to watch these programs live.  I’ll attest to that–one of the reasons I watch Lost live as it airs each Tuesday night is so I can participate in online discussions about the show during and immediately after it!

Where am I going with this?  Well, to continue with the metaphor, a lecture that includes no interactive component and is captured for later viewing by students is like a television show that you DVR and watch when you get around to it.  A lecture that includes interactive components like the use of clickers and backchannel discussion (which is very much like the kind of online discussions Poniewozik describes) is more like an “event” television show that you just have to watch live as it airs.  Wouldn’t it be great if students refused to skip class (and watch the lecture video or borrow a friend’s notes instead) because they’ll miss their best opportunity for learning?

Image: “Empty” by Flickr user Shaylor / 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

Last week I facilitated a workshop titled “Engaging Students in Large Lecture Courses” for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University.  Since many of those interested in teaching with clickers teach large lecture courses, I thought my blog readers might be interested in some of the resources from the workshop.

First, here’s a PowerPoint presentation on the basics of good lecturing I shared with the workshop participants ahead of time via Slideshare:

Next, here are the visuals I used during the workshop itself:

This was my first time using Prezi, and I found it to be an interesting alternative to PowerPoint.  The ability to arrange content spatially and at different resolutions was particularly helpful as I planned the workshop.  During the workshop, I mostly followed a planned path through the presentation–the one you can follow by clicking repeatedly on the “next” arrow above.  However, on a couple of occasions, questions were asked that prompted me to go off-path and zoom around the Prezi.  That ability is particularly valuable for responding to one’s audience.

My other experiment during the workshop was the use of Google Moderator as a backchannel tool.  Moderator allows users to submit questions to a presenter, but also to view other users’ questions and vote them up or down.  Prior to the workshop, I emailed the registered participants and invited them to submit questions about the workshop topic via Moderator.    During the last 15 minutes of the workshop, I asked the participants to open their laptops (or turn on their smart phones), log in to Moderator, submit additional questions, and vote on their peers’ questions.  This very quickly generated a nice list of questions, ranked in order of importance by the voting mechanism.  I then spent the remaining time in the workshop addressing the most important questions.

Having a room full of participants quietly tapping away on their mobile devices was a little too disconcerting for me, so, following Monica Rankin’s lead, I had the participants brainstorm questions in pairs, then submit them via Moderator.  This led to a nice buzz of discussion during the backchannel time and allowed me to wander the room and eavesdrop on the conversations, as I like to do during small group work.

I’ve blogged about other ways to implement backchannel in the classroom, so it was great to get some firsthand experience using Google Moderator for backchannel.  Moderator isn’t the most flexible tool available (there’s no way for a student to comment on another student’s question and the sorting algorithm isn’t entirely intuitive), but it’s simple and easy to use.  I also like that Moderator allows the presenter to comment on questions that have been submitted, which would allow me to address some of less popular questions not addressed during the workshop.  I find that many faculty (and students for that matter) are wary of Twitter, so Moderator might offer an accessible way for instructors to get started with backchannel.

Finally, I posted links to resources relevant to the engagement techniques I highlighted in the workshop (and in the Prezi above).   So if you’re interested in improving your physical presence in the classroom, using better visuals to complement your verbal presentation, or exploring ways to add interactive elements to your lectures, visit the online “home base” for the workshop.

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.

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!

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?