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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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.

A little while ago I reviewed an article by David Campt and Matthew Freeman describing the use of clickers in dialogue facilitation.  I was impressed by their nuanced use of participant perspective questions–the kinds of questions I call “student perspective questions” in my book, questions that surface students’ (or dialogue participants’) opinions and experiences.  The idea of using what appears to be a factual question (such as, “What percent of US citizens are people of color?”) to surface participants’ assumptions and impressions was particularly interesting.  Prior to reading their paper, I hadn’t thought of such questions as perspective questions.

More recently, Campt and Freeman wrote a short article for the Web site Religious Conference Manager describing ways clickers might be used in religious settings (sermons, conferences, and so on).  The article describes the kinds of perspective questions I mentioned above, as well as strategies for making the most of clickers in these settings.  The following line stood out to me:

Internet experiences and television shows are creating the expectation that people will be co-creators rather than mere passive vessels.

I hear this perspective expressed frequently in educational technology discussions, particularly in regard to students’ participation in Web 2.0 online tools like Facebook and YouTube, tools where students are not only consumers of content but producers.  I hadn’t thought about this notion in the context of teaching with clickers, however.

Certainly, if you’re giving your students a quiz that requires them to recall a few facts, then you’re not using clickers to help students become “co-creators” of knowledge in the classroom.  However, if you’re asking clicker questions designed to generate discussion (like tough conceptual understanding questions, application questions, or critical thinking questions), then as students involve themselves in that discussion, they are, indeed, become co-creators in their learning.  And if you’re using clickers for perspective questions in the ways that Campt and Freeman do, then the students’ responses (their opinions and experiences) are integral to the learning process, making them co-creators.

When used just for voting, clickers do indeed bring in the interactive element that students are accustomed to having in their daily life–”liking” a friend’s wall post in Facebook, rating a book on Amazon, voting for a favorite contestant on American Idol.  We live in a participatory culture where everyone seems to get a vote, a way to provide feedback.  Clickers provide a way to connection with that culture in the classroom.

Moreover, when used to generate discussion, clickers help motivate an even more participatory culture in the classroom, one similar to that of a blog with an active commenting community.  The author of a blog post gets the conversation going, but everyone weighs in–just like an instructor gets a conversation going by posing an engaging clicker question and the students weigh in via votes and discussion.

What do you think?  Does teaching with clickers work particularly well with students used to a participatory culture?  Do you buy the argument that today’s culture is more participatory than, say, 15 years ago?

Reference: Campt, D., & Freeman, M. (2009). Talk through the hand: Using audience response keypads to augment the facilitation of small group dialogue. The International Journal of Public Participation, 3(1), 80-107.

Summary: This article by David Campt and Matthew Freeman describes ways to use clickers to facilitate dialogue among small-to-medium-sized groups of people (6 to 40 people) with common interests but diverse perspectives.  For example, the authors mention using clickers with residents of an urban neighborhood facing tough questions that involve race and class, as well as with employees from multiple levels of hierarchy within a business discussing the mission and functions of the business.  The authors describe themselves as “dialogue facilitators” and their work as collaborative actions, which uses “dialogue, inquiry, and deliberation to inspire participants, build working relationships, and make decisions about collaborative actions they will take to improve their communities.”  (Wilson, P. (2004). Deep democracy: The inner practice of civic engagement. Fieldnotes: A Journal of the Shambala Insitute. 3, 1-6.)

The authors describe a few different types of clicker questions they use to foster dialogue, including demographic questions exploring participants’ diverse backgrounds, experience questions asking participants “whether or how frequently they may have had specific experiences,” opinion questions about internal and external issues relevant to the community, and fact questions designed to explore differences between objective facts (such as statistics about demographics in the United States) and participant perceptions of those facts.

The authors also describe dialogue focused on collaborative action to have several phases, including introducing participants to each other and to the dialogue process, sharing participant experiences and perceptions, exploring diversity and commonalities with the goal of understanding “underlying social conditions” that produce diverse perspectives, and exploring possibilities for action.  The authors describe several ways that clickers can enhance dialogue in each phase, but they focus primarily on the earlier phases.

For instance, asking demographic clicker questions during the introduction phase can help participants learn about each other more quickly, particularly around demographic characteristics that aren’t immediately visible, such as political affiliation or sexual orientation.  These questions can provide “teachable moments” about group processes, such as reminding participants to be respectful of those with backgrounds different from their own, and help enhance “participants’ sense of empathy for others.”

During the introductory phase, clicker questions can also help to surface common intentions among participants.  The authors note that when there are two “sides” on a contentious issue, often both sides have similar goals but different opinions about reaching those goals.  Asking a clicker question that makes evident participants’ common intentions can help defuse some of the tension in the room that might otherwise arise.

Furthermore, “fact” questions can help bring important facts into the subsequent conversation, often “demonstrating that people in the group know less than they think they do about an issue of relevance,” leading to more open-minded attitudes.

The authors also discuss the use of participant experience questions (e.g. “How long has it been since the last time you can recall witnessing an act of racial discrimination?”) in the second phase of their dialogue facilitation-helping participants understand the variety of perspectives they have on the topic at hand.  Asking such a question, then hearing from a few participants, then commenting on any pattern that emerges (e.g. “It seems that more of the people of color have recent stories.”) is one approach.  However, having those patterns emerge through the results of a clicker question can demonstrate such patterns more quickly and prevent participants from thinking the facilitator is finding patterns that he or she wants to see in the responses.  The authors also note the use of demographic comparison questions, parsing the results of an experience question according to some demographic characteristic of the participants.

Other uses are discussed, as well, including showing matches between clicker question results and national polling data for some questions, helping participants come to decisions about collaborative action steps, and providing both facilitator and participants with information about participants’ feelings about a session at the end of the session.

Finally, the authors make the point several times that clicker questions and their results serve to generate productive dialogue.  They are not an end to themselves.

Comments: While I typically discuss the use of clickers in college and university settings on this blog, I wanted to share and comment on this article since the authors have a particularly nuanced and informed approach to fostering dialogue-with and without clickers-that college and university instructors reading this blog might find useful, particularly those who discuss controversial or sensitive issues in the classroom.  Their writing is also informed by a research literature on fostering dialogue that would likely be unfamiliar to most academics.  I’m also excited by growing use of clickers and other response systems in non-academic educational settings, such as community dialogues as described in this article, as well as church services, corporate presentations, and social science research.

I found the author’s description of types of clicker questions they use to align nicely with the types of clicker questions I group under the umbrella term “student perspective questions.”  I usually think of these questions as being about student demographics, student experiences, or student opinions.  I hadn’t thought about putting factual questions in this category, but it makes sense.  Seeing how students (or dialogue participants) perceive objective facts serves a similar purpose as these other types of questions-helping the community better understand each other and helping the teacher / facilitator better understand the community.  When used to demonstrate to students or participants that they know less than they think they do about a particular topic, these questions also serve to generate a “time for telling.”

When reading about the use of clicker questions to surface common intentions (as described above), I wondered if there’s a risk of having participants feel like such a question is rigged, that the facilitator is asking it mainly as a set-up to make the point that “we all have something in common.”  If there’s a risk of that, I wonder what Campt and Freeman might do to minimize that risk.  I also wonder what they might do if this kind of question backfires, showing that the participants have less in common than they think they do.

A few other questions occurred to me as I was reading the paper’s section on directions for future research on the use of response systems in dialogue facilitation.  The authors ask, “Are there people whose verbal participation in dialogues increases as keypad use increases?”  I would also ask, might a participant who finds out he or she is in the distinct minority on a particular issue be less likely to participate in discussion?  The authors also ask if the availability of providing anonymous feedback might have some distorting effect on reported opinions.  I wondered that, as well, thinking about how contentious or smart aleck participants might abuse the ability to respond anonymously.

I also wonder if there might be a role for pair or small-group discussion prior to voting in these settings.  Peer instruction is a common application of clickers in educational settings-might something similar play a role in dialogue facilitation?  Also, what about asking the same questions at the start and end of a dialogue session as a way to show participants how they’ve changed their perspectives over the course of the dialogue?  Might that be useful in some contexts?

Chris Iufer of Duarte Design posted a great blog entry earlier this week on using free-response audience feedback during a presentation by Nancy Duarte at the Web 2.0 Expo.  Chris describes the process he used to determine how to collect and display this feedback.  He first enlisted his colleagues to help him think about the potential audience for this presentation, then applied the results of that activity to decisions regarding the use Twitter, Poll Everywhere, and the Meebo chat room service.

I follow the Duarte Design blog because I was impressed with what I’ve seen of Nancy Duarte’s book on presentations, slide:ology.  (Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen is another great book on designing and delivering presentations.)  As you might imagine, my interest in classroom response systems has led to an interest in effective presenting, which in turn has led to an interest in visual explanations (e.g., the great “In Plain English” videos produced by Common Craft), visual thinking (e.g., the organization VizThink and Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin), and even graphic facilitation (e.g., Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog).

I find it exciting when some of my varied interests overlap.  For instance, when Garr (Presentation Zen) Reynolds blogged about the comic book created by Scott McCloud that Google used to explain its new Web browser Chrome, I found my worlds colliding.  I’ve followed Scott McCloud’s work since reading his book Understanding Comics years ago, thanks to my interest in comic books in high school, and I’ve come to appreciate his ability to explain complex ideas in words and pictures (that is, using comics).  Putting comics, visual explanations, and Web technology all in one blog post made for an interesting read for me, to say the least.

Back to Chris Iufer’s post about audience feedback.  He ended up using the Meebo service, which worked well for him.  (I think Poll Everywhere would have done the job well, too, had he used the free-text response option.)  He asked in his post, “Have you ever participated in a live poll during a presentation? What was your experience like? Is this something you would do in one of your presentations?”

His questions remind me that some of the challenges and opportunites we see in using classroom response systems in the world of higher ed are becoming relevant to other domains, including the domain of professional presentations that Duarte Design knows well.  Here’s another domain: I know of a couple of churches that have experimented with Poll Everywhere for audience feedback during their pastor’s sermons.  I hope that our worlds will collide a little more often in the future so that those of us in these various arenas can learn from each other.

I use Google Alerts to keep up with news about clickers.  A lot of the news involves system adoptions by K-12 schools, some of the news is about clicker use at the undergraduate level, and every now and then there’s an article about clicker use in other settings.  Here are a few recent examples of non-classroom uses of clickers.

Community Meetings

Clickers were recently used to help generate a “community vision” for the Aspen, Colorado, area during town hall meetings.  They were also used during “core beliefs” community meetings back in 2006:

When the clickers were used for these “Core Beliefs” sessions, it was typical to hear a buzz in the room as people reacted to the results on the big screen. It’s truly a collective community experience.

In a similar way, clickers were used to gather community input on plans for school facilities in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Asked about the format, Dodds Cromwell, one of the MGT consultants, said, “It’s hard to have a large town meeting without a small number of people monopolizing the conversation.” The clicker system “helps people understand that a large number of people care but may have differing priorities,” he said.

Mock Trials

In October Northern Kentucky University hosted an interactive mock trial exploring the arguments over teaching evolution in public schools.  The interactive element was provided by clickers distributed to the audience members, allowing them to voice their opinions and decide the case.

Update (2/21/09): Clickers were also used a recent meeting of Minnesota wheat farmers.  Also, here’s a report from the Aspen meeting I mentioned above.

Inside Higher Ed posted a story yesterday on a session at the annual meeting of the Association of the Study of Higher Education that explored the ethics of “double dipping,” which is described as faculty “using the same scholarly material in multiple formats and settings.”  For instance, some would consider presenting the same talk at two different conferences unethical.

I found it interesting that Marybeth Gasman and Kristen Renn, the presenters of the session, used clickers to poll the audience, asking for their opinions on the ethics of various actions.  For example,

Is it ethical to submit a proposal to present the same paper to the annual meetings of both ASHE and the American Educational Research Association , which follows the higher education scholarly meeting by a few months? Yes, if the proposal is rejected by ASHE first, said 14 respondents. Yes, even if ASHE accepts it, said two. No under any circumstances, said three others.

This is a great example of the use of clickers to ask opinion questions.  In this public setting where the audience members (faculty members and educational researchers in this case) don’t know each other well and where the topic of the session is a controversial one, asking for a show of hands just might not do the trick.  The anonymity provided by the clickers helps encourage honest answers, and the results of the clicker questions displayed on-screen provide data to fuel the group discussion.