Please Forgive My Redundancy

Clickers in the classroom? ... using Blackboard as the platform for “Internet-enabled technology?”

http://www.blackboard.com/company/vision.aspx

That is soooo twentieth century. Even the name of the company is revealing. Blackboards were replaced many years ago by greenboards ... and they were replaced quite some time ago by whiteboards. Ouch!

I am a mathematician/statistician. I am not an anthropologist, and what I know about anthropology would not fill a thimble. But I love to learn, and I suppose for that reason I read Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (in 1998) and “Collapse” (in 2006). Ordinarily – say in 1980 — that would be the end of it, and my knowledge of topics discussed in Diamond’s books would be close to 100% of my knowledge of the subject. But I spend quite a bit of time on line – it’s a Hell of a lot more informative, interesting, and entertaining than reading some combination of the World Book Encyclopedia, the New York Times, and National Geographic – and there I read a great many critiques of Diamond’s theories.

At least early on, Diamond was thought to be an intellectual giant ... even an intellectual giant with all the right answers. But today I am convinced that, when it comes to Easter Island, for example, he got it mostly wrong. Not only that but his analysis of the collapse of human inhabitance of the island is, to my way of thinking, an important part of his overall theme. If he got that wrong, what else should we be questioning about his work?

Obviously, what I’m suggesting is that the Internet gives “all of us” opportunities for learning that were unimaginable just a few years ago. We Americans may not be brilliant, but there is no excuse for us to be less than remarkably well-informed. That’s interesting I think, but that’s not my point. My point is that the Internet, broadly interpreted, gives “all of us” opportunities for “teaching” that were not only unimaginable just a few years ago, they are unimaginable to 95% of college and university faculty (my deflated guess) as we speak. In other words, I’m claiming that 95% of the caretakers of higher education in these United States today are anachronisms, happily wallowing in the muck of a pedagogical status quo whose efficiency rating is, at best, somewhere around 30% (my inflated guess). And Blackboard will not even come close to saving the day. Indeed, if you don’t mind being at least a decade behind the times, opt for Blackboard.

I could go on, but, instead, why not make a plate of killer nachos (chips, black beans, jalapeño peppers, melted cheese, and guacamole ... and topped with a really hot salsa, of course), crack a beer (with a couple more cooling in the fridge), and “attend” this “lecture” by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Stick with him through the less interesting part where he describes what he’s going to do, because watching him actually do it will, I hope, make you feel bad about what you’re doing in the classroom yourself (especially if you’re a Blackboard wonk). You’ll also forgive him for describing options for teaching in precisely the same format that he critiques ... and we all know by our own experience, that’s a format that is incredibly inefficient.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s

And please don’t forget, PowerPoint is evil!

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Frizbane Manley, at 9:10 am EDT on July 18, 2008

Don’t fixate on the clicker

(First: Go Frizbane! Right with you, man. And Wesch does such a great job of getting concepts across. And Tufte is right about Powerpoint. :-)

Student response systems that work like clickers do improve learning, but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with these overpriced, dedicated remote controls. I worry that people will use this article as ammo for forcing more students to buy these sole-purpose dinosaurs when that’s not necessary. See Ira Socol’s great blog post on this at http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/02/instant-anachronism.html.

Want instant feedback? A colleague has used red/green cards as audience polling for years, to give him a sense of how well students are grasping the subject. And now that laptops are near-ubiquitous, why not gather this data directly online, perhaps by a survey (in Bb or SurveyMonkey)? Not identical to the clicker bundleware, but workable in some contexts.

Even more promising, how about using students’ predelictions for texting? Poll Everywhere uses cell phones as clickers: http://www.polleverywhere.com/. I suspect this kind of solution will make dedicated clickers obsolete if it catches on.

Let’s not rescuscitate the clicker just because some people got jazzed over them at a conference—after all, 40% had either never heard of them or never used them. At a Blackboard conference!

Last, thanks for covering the resistance to doing everything through Blackboard. It’s the Microsoft of LMS’s, gobbling up everything and limiting innovation. It has some great functionality but should not be the shaper of our instructional technology.

Joe Clark, at 10:10 am EDT on July 18, 2008

clicker

When using clicker responses as part of a course grade in a class of several hundred, my experience was that an inordinate amount of time was spent dealing with “the dog ate my clicker” or “my battery went dead in class".

Don Steeples, Senior Vice Provost at U of Kansas, at 12:00 pm EDT on July 18, 2008

Clicker Efficacy Supported By Research

There was an extensive debate about clickers vs. other technologies in June at http://www.insidehighered.com:80/views/2008/06/19/groveman.

Useful technology catches on. Fads go away.

When I taught, I preferred chalkboards (black, green, and blue) over whiteboards. Just my preference. Doesn’t make me a bad teacher.

Cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and CD players were distractions for students so I wouldn’t use any of these technologies IN THE CLASSROOM. If beneficial, I might have used them for assignments.

In the right hands, clickers are a great teaching tool. There is a myriad of research supporting this fact.

John B., at 5:50 pm EDT on July 18, 2008

Low-Tech Alternatives to Clickers

Thanks, John B., for directing readers to last month’s discussion here about clickers, a discussion that featured some debate about the merits of clickers relative to higher-tech alternatives (cell phones, etc.). That discussion, however, didn’t speak to the use of low-tech alternatives to clickers mentioned here. I thought I might weigh in with a few comments.

Bradley Beck wrote, “It seems the clicker can have it’s place, but if the red and green cards, or a quick request from students to write down what they learned that day will do the trick instead, then why waste time and money on clickers?” I certainly see pedagogical value in the use of flash cards or response cards and in having student submit “one-minute” papers at the end of class. I would, however, like to point out a couple of advantages clickers (or some other electronic system, like the Poll Everywhere text-messaging system mentioned above) have over these methods.

One limitation of the response card method is that it doesn’t allow instructors to hold students accountable for their answers. This can decrease participation and engagement. Also, the response card method doesn’t allow the students to see the distribution of responses, which can be an important use of classroom response systems. (Imagine asking a question about student opinion where students are surprised to learn about the diversity of opinions held by their peers.) Finally, there’s some evidence that the response card method provides less accurate information about student learning and student perspectives than clickers since students are able to see the responses of their immediate neighbors and switch their answers to more popular answers, even if those answers are not honest ones.

As for the idea of having students respond in writing to a prompt at the end of class, this method doesn’t allow an instructor to act upon information gained about student perspectives during class. Classroom response systems (including response cards) allow instructors to practice what is sometimes called “agile teaching,” responding in the moment to what they learn about their students’ learning. This can help instructors tailor their instructor to the immediate learning needs of their student, and it’s one of the great advantages of using a classroom response system.

Derek Bruff, at 11:05 am EDT on July 20, 2008