Moreover, this was my first time (successfully) using Prezi Meeting, which allowed me to control a Prezi using my laptop that the participants at Skidmore viewed on one of their big screens. All I had to do was send a link to Ben at Skidmore. He opened that link on his end, allowing participants there to see the Prezi as I “drove” it from my end. The combination of videoconferencing and Prezi Meeting worked beautifully.

Here’s the Prezi I used. You can click the forward arrow to move through the Prezi along the path I used, or you can use your mouse to zoom and pan freely.

At the end of my opening keynote, I encouraged participants to submit questions about teaching with and supporting faculty use of clickers in a Google Moderator session. Moderator allows users to submit questions and vote other users’ questions up or down. This meant that by the end of the event, when I was scheduled to rejoin the event by videoconferencing, a number of important questions had bubbled to the top of the Moderator list. I didn’t get a chance to address all of these questions during that final session, so Ben asked me to tackle of a few of them here on the blog.

“How do you create a safe space for experimentation and emerging tech (specifically clickers) in the the face of traditional prof assessment and tenure?”

This is an important question, since experimenting with one’s teaching (in any way, using technology or not) is often a rocky experience the first time through, for the instructor as well as for the students. The second or third time using a new teaching method often works very well, but how can we encourage faculty to try something for the first time, running the risk of taking a few dings in their all-important (unfortunately) student course evaluations? There are two constraints at play here. One is that using a new teaching method, like teaching with clickers, takes time to implement. The other is that students are often resistant to do anything out of the ordinary.

To help instructors overcome the former constraint (limited time), I encourage them to make small changes in their teaching over time. For instance, an instructor interested in teaching with clickers might select one or two moments during an otherwise traditional lecture to ask students an application-level clicker question using the peer instruction technique. This need not take too much class time (maybe 5 minutes for relatively straight-forward questions) or prep time (just the time needed to think of one good clicker question), but the payoff can be very positive in terms of student engagement and feedback on student learning to the instructor. Most instructors who try this report back that they’re surprised at how poorly students understand their lectures during the lectures themselves. This often motivates further changes in teaching methods.

To deal with the latter constraint (student resistance), I share the same answers I do to one of the other Google Moderator questions: “What are the common mistakes instructors make which cause clickers to be ineffective?”

• Don’t ask clicker questions that are too easy. Easy questions may build student confidence and serve to make sure students are awake during class, but they don’t lead to student engagement or learning, and students pick up on this. Too many easy questions lead students to think clickers are a waste of class time.
• Make sure you respond to the results of a clicker question. Don’t just ask it, glance at the results, and move on. Again, students will perceive clickers being used this way as a waste of time since they don’t inform class discussions.
• And whatever you do, don’t just use clickers for graded quizzes and taking attendance. Students will resent you using technology to monitor them like Big Brother. Students really appreciate clicker questions when they’re used to improve their learning. They push back pretty hard when clickers are only used to make the instructor’s job easier.

“Is the ‘peer instruction model’ indeed the best clicker model, or should other models be considered as well?”

You’ll notice in the Prezi above that my opening keynote focused on the peer instruction approach to teaching with clickers. It’s the most common way to use clickers, and it’s a pedagogically sound approach. It also does a good job of leveraging aspects of the technology that enhance the learning experience for students. However, there are other ways to use clickers in the classroom that can be very useful depending on your context.

• Clickers are a useful supplement to team-based learning. Part of the TBL approach includes having students work through challenging case studies in class, first as individuals then as teams. Some TBL instructors have students use clickers (sometimes in self-paced modes) to submit their individual work, allowing the instructors to see how quickly students are moving through the material and giving instructors a heads up on areas of difficulty to be addressed later in class during discussion. During the team activities, each team is required to come to consensus on each question, so giving each team a single clicker to report their answer works well. The results of these team clicker questions can then help guide the team-to-team discussion that follows.
• If you have your students share their work (papers, presentations, posters, and so on) with each other, clickers can help facilitate peer assessment. Ask students to assess each other’s work using a series of clicker questions, preferably ones tied into your grading rubric. Students are often hesitant to critique each other’s work in public. The anonymity the clickers provide can help break the ice and open class discussions to more meaningful, more evaluative discussions. See this ProfHacker post of mine for an example of peer assessment with clickers in a writing course.
• Asking students not only to report their answers but also their confidence in their answers can promote useful metacognitive thinking. Some instructors use confidence questions regularly, but I find myself using them mostly on true/false questions. All of my true/false clicker questions now have four answers: true (high confidence), true (low confidence), false (low confidence), false (high confidence). I find that these answer choices give me much more useful data with which to make on-the-fly teaching choices, and they ask students to reflect a bit more deeply on their own learning.
• Another option, rarely used by instructors in my experience given the prep work it requires, is to use clickers to facilitate “Choose Your Own Adventure” class sessions. You might have students work through a complex problem during class, asking them clicker questions at several points along the way whose outcomes determines the direction of the subsequent problem solving and class discussion. See these posts of mine on “question trees” (my term, not as explanatory, but also not trademarked) for a few examples.

“What’s the next big innovation coming to clickers?”

Hard to say, but my money is on live, educational crowdsourcing using mobile devices like smart phones, tablets, and laptops. For instance, a few weeks ago in my statistics course, I asked students to collaborate in the development of an analytic rubric for use in their infographic project. A Google Docs spreadsheet worked well enough for this, but I can imagine more sophisticated apps that would make this kind of activity more efficient and effective. Google Moderator, for instance, makes handling Q&A easier and more effective, since the questions of relevance to the most people are the ones that rise to the top of the list. And Prezi Meeting worked well as a collaborative platform for creating a debate map in my cryptography course last year.

Earlier this semester, I asked students to sketch (using pen and paper) ideas for visualizing a complex set of ecological footprint data. With 70 students (and no document camera), I decided that the simplest way for us to view and discuss a few of these sketches was to have students use their phones to photograph their sketches and send them to my email account via email or SMS text messaging. (Most carriers in the US will let you send a text message, even one with an image, to an email account.) This let me pull up a few images on the big screen for classwide discussion. As with the Google Docs spreadsheet, this wasn’t a particularly elegant way to facilitate this activity, but it worked. Having student photos automatically show up on a page of thumbnail images would have worked better, however.

These examples may not seem to be similar to the use of clickers, but I would consider them as part of a broader understanding of a “classroom response system.” In each case, students are able to submit responses (text and images instead of multiple-choice answers) independently and I’m able to aggregate those responses in some way (not a bar chart, but something content-specific) that facilitates class discussion. In that sense, I see classroom response systems moving toward these kinds of in-class, synchronous applications.

With this year’s theme, Pencils & Pixels: 21st Century Practices in Higher Education, we invite an informed exploration of the unprecedented array of technologies, both high-tech and low-tech, in use at institutions of higher learning. New technologies continue to arise, faster than most of us can assimilate. Some are seductive. Others seem to be more trouble to learn than they are worth. Some may seem frivolous, but upon closer examination have exciting applications for teaching, learning, and professional and organizational development. At the same time, many of the very best pedagogical technologies are neither new nor digital. It is probably no coincidence that the growing interest in contemplative practices and “slow teaching” is occurring simultaneously with the current smart phone and social media explosion. How are digital technologies affecting the way students learn? How can we support faculty and students—many of whom wear their smart phones like appendages—in selecting appropriate technologies for the work at hand? When, if ever, is it appropriate to insist that students, faculty, and even organizations disconnect entirely from digital tools and social media? How do high-tech and low-tech pedagogies inform each other?

As you might imagine, I’m really looking forward to this conference! I expect there will be a number of interesting sessions on both educational technology (pixels) and visual thinking (pencils). The keynote speakers are Michael Wesch (whom I blogged about a couple of months ago) and Alex Pang.

I’m contributing a session on social pedagogies, tentatively scheduled for October 27th at 3:00 p.m. Here’s the abstract:

Social pedagogies (Bass & Elmendorf, 2010) are those in which students construct knowledge by representing that knowledge for authentic audiences. Although these pedagogies can be implemented without technology, they provide a useful framework with which instructors can determine how digital technologies can support teaching and learning. In this session, we will use this framework to consider how social media (course blogs, social bookmarking, Twitter) can be used to connect students with authentic audiences, including their peers and the rest of the world, in order to motivate those students toward deeper learning.

I’m also taking the lead on the Sunday morning anchor session which will, if all goes as planned, combine the pencils and pixels sub-themes with a little “wisdom of crowds” in an engaging and informative way. More on that session later.

First, a recap of that earlier post: I asked students to find and share examples of good infographics. Then they identified aspects of effective infographic design (organization, use of color, data visualization, and so on) and drafted descriptions of different levels of quality (poor, acceptable, good, excellent) for those aspects. I used their suggestions to design a draft rubric, which they used to evaluate a couple of sample infographics. This gave them a chance to think more concretely about the qualities of effective infographics, and gave us all a greater shared understanding of those qualities.

What’s happened since then? I took the draft rubric and refined it, yielding a more-or-less final version that I’ll use to grade the students’ infographics. Here’s the result:

Math 216 Infographic Rubric

The first page is similar to rubrics I’ve used for this assignment in the past when the student product was a five-page paper. It’s the second page that is all new, featuring some visual thinking standards (spatial relationships, colors, text), a little info literacy (sources), and a couple of more holistic categories (organization, aesthetics). This isn’t an entirely objective rubric, particularly when it comes to aesthetic appeal, but I don’t think a little subjectivity can be avoided in this genre.

I distributed this version of the rubric to the students so they would know what I was expecting for their infographics. I also provided them with some resources for creating infographics,  some suggestions for finding and using Creative Commons images,  and answers to several frequently asked questions about the assignment.

Then the students went to work, with relatively little assistance from me along the way. I helped a few groups with questions about statistics and about R (the statistical software we’re using in the course), and one group had to ditch their original project idea when it became clear they couldn’t get the data they needed. They took on a project proposed by another group of students, a process made easier by the fact that all of the project proposals had been posted to the course blog. Other than these interactions, the students worked on their own, producing some very impressive infographics. I’ve included a few below as examples, but all of the infographics are on the course blog.

In past offerings of this course, I’ve organized a student poster session on the last day of class, giving students an opportunity to see the good work of their peers. This semester, however, the fact that I have 70 students and a pretty small classroom meant that a traditional poster session wouldn’t work. Instead, we had a “seated poster session” in which the students were stationary and the posters circulated around the room.

I told the students that if they submitted their infographic to the course blog at least an hour before the final class, they would be eligible for “prizes” (extra credit). Most of the infographics were turned in before this deadline, enabling me to spend the morning before the last class printing 11″ x 17″ copies of the students’ infographics. Only three of the infographics translated poorly to this format: two that were very long and skinny and one that was submitted as a Prezi. The rest turned out great.

I made two copies of each infographic and brought these to class along with copies of a checklist of all the infographics and voting forms. I asked the students to take a look at all the infographics by passing the hard copies around, taking notes on each for the purposes of voting in three categories: Most Interesting Application, Best Data Visualization, and Most Attractive Infographic. The next 35 minutes or so were productively chaotic, with students viewing, discussing, and passing around the infographic “posters.” I took a few photos of the chaos, which you can see here in this post. Most of the students were highly engaged in this process, making many lively comments about the infographics their peers designed.

The poster circulation got a little challenging near the end of the viewing time, as each student’s list of unseen posters got smaller. My TA and I did what we could to help students get the posters they needed to see, first by calling out the numbers of posters that were not being used by students, then by asking students for the numbers of the posters they needed to see and trying to track down copies of those posters. This worked well enough, but was challenging to do with 24 posters and close to 70 students in the room.

Another challenge I didn’t expect was counting the votes once they were in. I had students submit votes in writing, as I’ve done in past poster sessions. Counting nearly 70 votes in three categories, however, took more than the ten minutes I had given myself at the end of class to do so. I had to announce “contenders” in each category as class ended, then finish counting and post results on the course blog shortly after class. Next time I’ll either use clickers for the voting or have a plan in place for my TAs to help count.

During the poster session, I also asked my students what software they used to create their infographics. I had suggested they use R or Excel to create data visualizations, and then insert those charts and graphs into a PowerPoint or Prezi. I also mentioned Visual.ly, a free online tool for creating infographics, letting the students know that I hadn’t used the tool myself but that it looked promising. Below are the tools they actually used, with usage rates in parentheses.

1. Excel (66%)
2. PowerPoint (51%)
3. Photoshop (41%)
4. Paint (38%)
5. Google Docs (21%)
6. Illustrator (16%)
7. Matlab or Mathematica (5%)
8. Gimp (5%)
9. Prezi (3%)

Not listed above is R, since I had taught them how to use R, and I was more interested in finding out which programs the students used that I hadn’t taught them. Also, this was a multiple-mark clicker question, and I wasn’t sure how such a question would handle two-digit inputs!

You’ll notice that the numbers above add up to more than 100%. Most students used two or three programs for their infographics, with some students using four or five different pieces of software. The Excel + PowerPoint combo was popular, sometimes with the lowly Windows Paint program in the mix. Excel + Photoshop was popular, too. One group used Photoshop + Illustrator + Google Docs + Excel + Matlab, and the Prezi group also used Illustrator + PowerPoint + Excel + Paint.

Before I share the winning infographics, I’ll share one more anecdote related to this assignment. One of the groups ran the numbers on a set of resistors from Joe Knows Electronics for their project. The group had purchased the resistors for use in their senior design project. Shortly after their infographic went live on the course blog, Joe, the founder and CEO of Joe Knows Electronics, left a comment on the blog post praising the students’ work and providing some information on the company’s quality assurance practices. One of the students in that group told me about the comment from Joe, and then left a response, linking to a video of Joe’s resistors in action at the School of Engineering Senior Design Day. Authentic audiences in action!

Without further ado, here are the winning infographics, as voted by the students themselves.

Most Interesting Application: “Is Rand Stealing Your Lunch Money?” (Click on any of these to see larger versions.)

Most Attractive Infographic: “Body Dimensions of Active Young Adults”

Best Data Visualization: There was a three-way tie in this category. One of the winners was “Body Dimensions of Active Young Adults,” seen above. The other two were “Do Baseball Salaries Influence Playoff Births?”

and “SAT Scores by State”

I hope you’ve gotten something out of this very long post. If nothing else, I’m glad for the chance to brag on my hard-working students!

Sloppy use of the term "flipped class" (I'm looking at you, @wired) leads to rants like @timbuckteeth's: http://t.co/nivzZZJA

April 20, 2012 7:14 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@derekbruff

Derek Bruff

This came about 24 hours after another tweet on the same theme:

@EveProper Ah, I see. Yes, the #flipclass term is getting used in some sloppy ways, like applying it to anything where videos are involved.

April 19, 2012 11:21 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@derekbruff

Derek Bruff

Here’s a quote from Steve (@timbuckteeth) Wheeler’s “rant” about the flipped classroom:

What ‘flipping the classroom’ boils down to it seems, is the creation of online content including videos that offsets the need for students to physically attend class.

That’s what I would call a “sloppy” use of the term “flipped class.” I’m not blaming Wheeler, however. (And “rant” is perhaps to harsh a term for his post.) I don’t know him, but he is often mentioned by educational technologists whom I very much respect, so I take him to be a pretty sharp guy. He’s been led astray by others who have used the term “flipped class” to describe teaching approaches that don’t involve a single bit of flipping. And when sharp guys get led astray by poor terminology use, that bothers me.

What is the flipped classroom? Check out how Stacey Roshan, a high school math teacher in Maryland, describes her teaching approach in this video interview:

In math, you usually have a classroom where students just listen to you talk the entire time and then they go home and struggle with the problem and never get to have any kind of real engaging discussion on it.  So I’ve been used Camtasia Studio to record lectures at home, and students watch those lessons for homework… Then in class we’re able to do homework problems together.  Students are engaged. They can have me walk around and help them one on one, which I never would have had time for if I had to lecture first.

And here’s a quote from an interview with Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur, who sees learning physics a two-step process featuring the transfer of information followed by the assimilation of that information:

‘In the standard [science teaching] approach, the emphasis in class is on the first, and the second is left to the student on his or her own, outside of the classroom,’ he says. ‘If you think about this rationally, you have to flip that, and put the first one outside the classroom, and the second inside. So I began to ask my students to read my lecture notes before class, and then tell me what questions they have [ordinarily, using the course’s website], and when we meet, we discuss those questions.’

And here’s Maureen Lage, Glenn Pratt, and Michael Treglia writing on “inverting the classroom” in the Journal of Economic Education way back in 2000:

Inverting the classroom means that events that have traditionally taken place inside the classroom now take place outside the classroom and vice versa… For example, the use of the World Wide Web and multimedia computers (and/or VCRs) enables students to view lectures either in computer labs or at home, whereas homework assignments can be done in class, in groups.

Whether you call it the flipped classroom or just-in-time teaching (as Mazur has done in the past) or the inverted classroom, the idea is the same: What would traditionally happen during class–what Mazur calls the transfer step–is shifted to before class, freeing class time for the kind of work that students would traditionally do on their own as homework. Since, as Mazur points out, it’s that second step that’s the more challenging of the two, why not have it happen during class when students can get help from their teacher and other students? That way each student can get one-on-one help from a teacher, as Stacey Roshan points out.

It’s this reversal of the use of in-class and out-of-class time that’s at the heart of the “flipped class.” More to the point, what really makes a “flipped class” works is what happens during class–the problem solving, the discussion, the group work, the feedback from teachers and peers. That’s where the deep learning happens. What happens before class is just whatever is needed to get students ready to participate more fully in the in-class activities.

Here’s another quote from Stacey Roshan from that interview:

The way we were taught is not necessarily the way that we should teach students.  And so we need to embrace the new technology that we’re surrounded with to help enhance our lessons.

I fully agree with Stacey’s first statement, but I don’t fully agree with it when modified by her second statement. I’m all for enhancing teaching with technology (as anyone who has read a single blog post of mine can attest), but it’s not the technology that makes the flipped class work. What makes it work is the fact that it upends the “stand and deliver” lecture model of teaching.

That’s why I object to the title of the Wired Magazine piece that Steve Wheeler cites: “Flipping the Classroom Requires More Than Video.” In fact, flipping the classroom doesn’t require video at all! There are plenty of us (many inspired by Eric Mazur) who teach in the math and sciences who ask students to come to class prepared to “assimilate” by having read their textbooks. The textbook is not a new technology, but it’s one that college teachers have perhaps not embraced to the extent that they could.

(Aside: Nothing I’ve said here is likely to make much sense to those who teach in the humanities, where it’s the norm to expect students to come to class having done the reading, then spend class time discussing that reading. Where humanities faculty might find this “flipped classroom” discussion interesting is in the ways that science and math teachers have found to hold students accountable for coming to class prepared. A common lament among humanities professors is that students don’t actually do the reading…)

Don’t get me wrong: I see lots of potential in having students prepare for class by watching short videos that introduce and explain course content. And I’m glad that technology makes such videos relatively easy for instructors to create–and that we’re not using the VCRs that those economists mentioned back in 2000! I’m particularly intrigued by the potential for students to watch (and rewatch) mobile-friendly videos on their smart phones and tablets.

However, I worry that talking about the “flipped class” as something that necessarily involves videos give educators the wrong idea. I don’t want the “flipped class” to turn into a buzzword without any real meaning–assuming that hasn’t already happened–because I see real value in the idea at the core of the “flipped class.” I don’t want educators to miss that idea because of sloppy terminology use.

Image: “No More Pencils, No More Books,” by me, Flickr (CC)

One result of Jim’s column is that I’ve picked up about a hundred new followers on my Twitter account. I’m glad to include these people, some new to Twitter and some Twitter veterans, in my own personal learning network, and I have a few bonus tips (not mentioned in Jim’s column) to share with both groups of Twitter users. I hope you find these tips helpful.

For those new to Twitter:

• Complete your Twitter profile by uploading a photo (of something, it doesn’t even need to be you) and providing a description of yourself. There’s value in having other Twitter users follow you (since they’ll be more likely to interact with you than those who don’t follow you), but many people (including me) are hesitant to follow someone who’s a blank slate on Twitter. A photo and a few details go a long way toward interesting others to follow you.
• Start tweeting. Sending out a few interesting tweets is a nice way to meet new people on Twitter. You never know who will see those tweets, perhaps through a keyword search or a retweet from someone already following you. Also, there’s not much reason to follow someone on Twitter if s/he isn’t saying anything there. I know that when I’m deciding whether to follow someone, I usually look at the person’s last few tweets to see if s/he tweets about topics of interest to me.
• Follow these ten Twitter users, if, that is, you’re interested in the kinds of things I’m interested in. Jim Lang asked me to recommend some Twitter accounts worth following, and, while my recommendations didn’t fit in his column, he posted them over on his personal blog. And don’t forget to follow Jim! His Twitter handle is @LangOnCourse.

For those with a bit more Twitter experience, I’ll let you in on a secret: Twitter says I’m currently following 884 other users, but there’s no way I can keep up with that many people, so I don’t. Instead, I’ve used Twitter’s list tool to create a private list I call “First Column.” This list consists of the Twitter users (172 of them right now) whose tweets I really don’t want to miss. I use the desktop and mobile app TweetDeck to access Twitter, because this app allows multiple columns of tweets, each satisfying different criteria. The first column in my TweetDeck is devoted to tweets from those on my “First Column” list (thus the list name). When I check Twitter, I usually read all the tweets in the first column of TweetDeck, then read only the very latest tweets in the second column, which consists of tweets from everyone I follow.

This set-up ensures that tweets from a (relatively) small set of colleagues don’t get lost in my Twitter stream, while also giving me some of the advantages of following lots and lots of people. My “First Column” list can sometimes act like a filter bubble, since the people on that list tweet about topics I already know I find interesting. Dipping into my entire Twitter stream (in the second column of TweetDeck) lets me burst that filter bubble and be surprised by unexpected topics or perspectives. There’s real value in having a diverse personal learning network, but too much diversity is tough to manage. Twitter’s list tool lets me have my cake and eat it, too.

Observability

First, here’s the Prezi I used during my presentation:

I was glad I had chosen to use Prezi for this presentation since questions and comments from the committee members almost immediately led me away from my intended presentation narrative. I panned and zoomed all over the Prezi in response to committee members’ comments, sharing the ideas and examples that seemed most relevant in the moment.

I made sure to embed a number of examples of innovation technology use, including links to published reports of these examples, throughout the Prezi, since it’s hard to envision where technology might take us without seeing concrete examples of its current use. I didn’t have time to discuss all these examples, but I knew that would be the case. I’ve posted this Prezi on the committee’s private blog so that other committee members can explore these examples on their own time.

Complexity

One point I made was that, while we have a few “early adopter” faculty members who are leading the way in the use of things like course blogs, we have many faculty members who are in need of more basic technology training and support. I mentioned our always-popular “PowerPoint Makeover Clinic” as an example of ways we’ve felt comfortable helping instructors who aren’t entirely confident with their technology skills. The College of Arts & Science presentation at the meeting supported this point, since their informal survey turned up a “smattering” of faculty who were actively using technologies, like course blogs, that many in the educational technology community would consider standard tools. These observations led the committee members to ask some important questions about technology training and support here on campus, as well as the “culture of adoption” we have among our faculty.

Relative Advantage

My mention of course blogs interested the committee, so I shared how my colleague Shaul Kelner uses a blog in his course on the sociology of tourism. One committee member asked a very sensible question about the value that a course blog adds beyond what is provided by, say, discussion forums in Blackboard, our course management system. I pointed out that course blogs are often easier for faculty and students to use, and, more importantly, make it possible to share student work with the open Web and for students to continue participating in learning communities after particular courses end. I borrowed Gardner Campbell‘s description of blogs as “public and persistent” platforms for sharing student learning.

I’m glad this question about a course blog’s relative value was raised. Some technologies help us do what we’re already doing more efficiently. Typical uses of course management systems to share announcements, files, and schedules with students is an example of this. However, some technologies help us do things that are impossible or incredibly difficult to do without technology. Those technologies and especially those uses of technology are what this committee should be exploring if we are to identify ways to enhance the teaching mission of the university.

To that end, I shared the notion of social pedagogies with the committee. These are, as regular readers of my blog know, approaches to teaching in which students are asked to construct knowledge by representing that knowledge for authentic audiences.  I mentioned the motivational aspects of having students write for each other or for the open Web on a course blog as an example of a social pedagogy. I find that the idea of social pedagogies provides a useful lens for seeing how technologies, particularly social media, can enhance the learning process for students. I hope that the committee members will start to use the language of social pedagogies as we move forward with our work.

The committee member who asked about the value of course blogs over discussion boards also asked another great question: What are ways to use a technology like course blogs effectively, in support of the learning objectives of the class? Surely there are more useful and less useful ways to use course blogs? The “best practices” question is another useful question for this committee to raise and address. I hope that whatever set of recommendations the committee generates includes ideas for helping faculty (a) learn about “best practices” where they are known and (b) contribute to the research on student learning that informs “best practices” where they are not known.

Cultural Compatibility

Another intellectual frame I shared with the committee was the idea of “students as producers.” I’ve long heard the lament from faculty that students too often think of themselves as “consumers” of higher education, seeing themselves as entitled to particular outcomes (like good grades) because they (or their parents) are the ones paying for education. The student-as-producer model provides a positive way to respond to this challenge. I learned of this term and the ideas behind it from Mike Neary at the NAIRTL Conference in Ireland last summer. Mike heads up the Student-as-Producer project at the University of Lincoln (in the UK, not Nebraska), a project that involves “a reappraisal of the relationship between academics and students, with students becoming part of the academic project of universities rather than consumers of knowledge.”

I think the student-as-producer idea has great potential as a way to leverage technology to enhance the teaching mission here and to address what one committee member called “Vanderbilt’s value proposition.” What does Vanderbilt uniquely offer? What can Vanderbilt uniquely do? As a research university, our faculty are actively producing new knowledge in many different ways. As a highly selective undergraduate institution, our students are capable of and interested in contributing to the production of knowledge. Technology can be used by students to produce new knowledge (as in Jay Clayton’s “Worlds of Wordcraft” course, where students create video game adaptations of Spencer’s The Faerie Queene), and to help students connect to authentic audiences for the work they produce.

Put another way, it’s all well and good that Harvard and Stanford and MIT are putting online great lectures by great professors, but what if Vanderbilt started sharing online not only the work of our faculty, but also the work of our students?

I’m not expecting my students to create data visualizations as slick as those examples, but I do want them to think outside the boxplot. For their final project in the course, I’m asking them to apply the statistical techniques they’ve learned to some “real world” problem and communicate their findings through an infographic. (What are infographics? See these examples.) I’ve given students a version of this assignment in the past, but back then I asked them to write up their findings in five-page papers. Although these students (most of whom are engineers) are likely to write reports in their future careers, I think that having them design infographics will give them a valuable opportunity to learn how to communicate statistical data visually, which I believe to be an increasingly important skill for those working in quantitative fields. Even so, I was on the fence regarding this assignment until I learned that Sidneyeve Matrix, a media and film professor at Queen’s University, gave her students a similar assignment recently. You can read my assignment here, and Sidneyeve’s assignment here.

To prepare my students for their infographic assignment, I first asked them to find examples of well-design infographics as part of their social bookmarking assignments in the course. I asked asked them to read “Ending the Infographic Plague” by Atlantic editor Megan McArdle. I figured the students would need a bit more instruction about this genre, so I used a technique I first used years ago while helping an engineering professor teach his students how to conduct effective oral presentations: I asked students to crowdsource a rubric for evaluating infographics.

Step 1: First I showed students a few of the infographics they had found for the social bookmarking assignment. I asked the students who bookmarked these infographics to share reasons they felt the infographics were effective. I added a few comments, and, between us, we surfaced several aspects of effective infographic design.

Step 2: Then I shared with my students part of the rubric I had used in the past for this application project. Each row of this rubric focused on a different aspect of the content of the project: questions, methods, assumptions, computations. For each of these components, the rubric included descriptors of work that was of poor, acceptable, good, or excellent quality. (Rubrics with this kind of structure are called analytic rubrics, in contrast to holistic rubrics which don’t have categories and instead have one descriptor for each grade an assignment might receive.) Sharing this old rubric helped me communicate my expectations for this assignment to my students, and gave them some understanding of how rubrics can be constructed.

Step 3: I asked students brainstorm additional rows for this rubric, ones that focused on the communication of statistical results through infographics, using the discussion from Step 1 as inspiration. Here’s where the crowdsourcing came in: I encouraged students to add their ideas to this shared Google doc, synchronously during class. Here’s where I had a crowdsourcing #fail: I didn’t ask my students to bring their laptops to class this day. Maybe a dozen of my students were able to contribute directly to the Google doc. The rest turned in their rubric ideas on paper. That was fine for them, but it meant I ended up typing a lot of their contributions into the Google doc after class. Next time I try something like this, I’ll make sure to have students bring their mobile devices to class!

Step 4: After looking through all the students contributions after class, I was able to group most of them into eight different categories: purpose, organization, data visualization, use of charts, use of color, use of text, sources, and aesthetics. For each category I selected a student who had submitted a set of descriptors for that category that were at least pretty good, then copied those eight sets of descriptors into a draft infographic rubric that I shared with the class the next day. I made clear to them that this was only a draft, that I wouldn’t use it as-is to grade their final projects, and that some of the descriptors might be better than others.

Step 5: Here’s where my experience teaching a writing seminar paid off. I distributed hard copies of two infographics from those bookmarked by my students (one on robots in the workplace and one on shoplifting around the world), along with two blank copies of the draft infographic rubric. I asked students to work in groups and evaluate the two sample infographics using the rubric, marking each infographic as poor, acceptable, good, or excellent in each category. Once they had done so, I aggregated their evaluations using a series of clicker questions such as “How did you evaluate the robot infographics’ use of color?” For each of these questions, I asked students to provide reasons for their evaluations, given us a chance to discuss various aspects of effective infographic design and have something of a shared understanding of expectations for their final projects.

Note: I’ve exaggerated a bit on Step 5 there. That was what I had planned for class on Monday since that’s more or less what happened when I used this rubric-and-clickers activity in my writing seminar, but we only had time to look at two aspects (purpose and use of color) of one of the two sample infographics. I’ll continue this process in class today, hopefully getting to that bit about a shared understanding. Step 6 will then involve me revising that draft infographic rubric, using feedback from the students generated during Step 5, and sharing it with the students as the grading rubric for their final projects.

I’ll conclude by saying that I really like the idea of having students contribute to the rubric used to evaluate their work. I think doing so gives students more investment in the assignment and a clearer understanding of the standards of quality in a particular domain. I bet they learn as much from each other (hearing other students’ suggestions for the rubric) as they do from the instructor. This strategy seems particularly useful when the genre of the project is a little weird (like an infographic), but I think it’s also useful with more traditional assignments (like five-paper papers) because students often don’t understand the standards of quality in our disciplines as much as we’d like to think they do.

One of the aspects of “digital pedagogies” we discussed that I found particularly interesting was the question of platform selection. I talked about giving my statistics students the choice between using Diigo and Pinterest this spring for their social bookmarking assignments. I have about 70 students in the course, and most of them went with Diigo. Only about eight students decided to use Pinterest. Why did most of my students choose Diigo? Since I haven’t asked them (yet), I’ll float a couple of hypotheses here, both predicated on the assumption that most of my students weren’t using either service.

Hypothesis 1: Students choosing Diigo over Pinterest selected the service that seemed more academic. Why might Diigo seem to be more academic in nature than Pinterest? There’s the fact that Pinterest is full of photos, and academic technology tools usually aren’t that visually dynamic. And there’s the impression that Pinterest is for non-academic uses. For example, Pinterest’s About page suggests that “people use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes,” and most of the popular press Pinterest receives supports the idea that people use Pinterest for personal hobbies and interests.

Hypothesis 2: Pinterest has the reputation for being a site mainly for women. Most of my engineering students are men, so they opted for the less gendered option, Diigo. Pinterest’s gendered reputation is not undeserved, since women account for 80% of users by some accounts. And wedding planning, home decor, and recipes (those activities suggested on the Pinterest About page) are certainly gendered activities in the US. I don’t see Pinterest as an inherently gendered platform–it’s just an image-based social bookmarking service. When I log on to Pinterest, I see some recipes and fashion pins, but I also see a fair amount of photography, data visualization, and generally geeky pins:

What you see on Pinterest depends entirely on whom you follow. That said, there must be some reason why 80% of Pinterest users are women, and given that many perceive the site as geared toward women, it’s perhaps understandable that my male engineering students opted for Diigo.

I can see both of those hypotheses playing out in other contexts in which students get to choose tools or platforms for use in their coursework. If students perceive a particular service as non-academic or geared for some demographic to which they don’t belong, they may be less likely to adopt it for academic use. For instance, could I persuade my students to use StumbleUpon as part of a course? I think many students who use StumbleUpon see it as a way to waste time, not learn about topics of academic interest, so that might be a hard sell. Some of my students might perceive Twitter as a platform for following celebrities and comedians; others might see it useful professionally, but only for those out of college. Either way, they might be hesitant to jump into Twitter as part of a class backchannel.

The two hypotheses above both assumed that my students weren’t already using either Pinterest or Diigo. However, it’s clear to me that some of the students who chose Pinterest were already Pinterest users. That observation leads me to two more hypotheses:

Hypothesis 3: Asking students to use a tool or platform they already use can mean less of a technological learning curve for them. This seems like a pretty safe assumption. I didn’t need to teach my Pinterest-using students how to use Pinterest. If I asked my students to use Facebook for my course, I feel that I could safely assume some basic facility with the platform. This isn’t a reason to rule out the use of other tools, but (a) it does mean you might save some time and effort by adopting tools that students already use and (b) if you go in some other direction, you might select a tool that has an interface similar to tools students already know. For instance, I can see using Yammer as a social network for a class since the Yammer interface is intuitive for someone used to using Facebook.

Hypothesis 4: Asking students to use a tool or platform they already use can mean navigating personal / professional boundaries. A couple of years ago, the question faculty often asked about Facebook was whether or not they should “friend” their students. That’s not as much of a live question these days: Most instructors make it a practice not to send a friend request to a student, although many will accept a friend request sent by a student. However, if students start leaving Facebook behind for other social networks like Pinterest, Spotify, Instagram, or even Twitter, the “to friend or not to friend” question will travel with them. I’ve chosen not to follow my students on Pinterest or Twitter, even though I know several of them use Pinterest and a couple of them follow me on Twitter. Will I follow them after they’ve graduated, a policy that many high school teachers use in regard to Facebook friending? Perhaps.

What do you think? Do you buy these hypotheses? Are there other factors you consider when selecting a digital tool or platform for use in your courses?

• The World’s Technology Podcast – The tagline for this podcast from the BBC/PRI/WGBH co-production The World is “Tech that matters.” Each week host Clark Boyd shares a fascinating set of stories on the intersection of technology and society. If you want gadget news, look elsewhere. If you want to learn about human connections to emerging uses of technology around the world, this is your podcast.
• On the Media – This WNYC production explores the media landscape, tackling everything from the news media coverage of presidential elections to troubles facing government whistle blowers to the use of social media in political protests to how music conveys emotion. They have a broad definition of “media,” which makes for a stimulating podcast each week.
• Radiolab – Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich host this other WNYC production which features… well, it features stories. Stories “where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience,” as their website says. The stories are fascinating, as are the methods the Radiolab team uses to tell those stories. They are, perhaps, the best audio-only explainers around these days.
• Click – Formerly known as Digital Planet, this BBC World Service production is hosted by Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson. Although they cover the technology gadget scene more than the World’s Technology Podcast does, Click also does a good job of discussing “tech that matters.” And lately, as part of a series on the technology of radio, they’ve been sharing nicely atmospheric audio recordings made by listeners using AudioBoo, including one of mine.
• Marketplace Tech Report – Hosted by John Moe (who, on Twitter, is absurd, funny, and sometimes absurdly funny), this American Public Radio show runs for about five minutes every weekday. It’s a fun way to keep up with the latest technology news. Regular segments include According to a Recent Study, Tech Report Theater, and Robots!.
• NPR 7AM ET News Summary – Speaking of short, daily podcasts, I have to recommend this one from NPR. When I started listening to podcasts on my daily commute several years ago, instead of live radio, I realized I needed a way to keep up with the news. NPR’s morning headlines work great for this.
• The World in Words – Unlike most of the podcasts listed here, there’s not a ton of technology in Patrick Cox’s weekly language podcast, but it’s a great listen nonetheless, providing snapshots of language and culture from around the world.
• To the Best of Our Knowledge – This Wisconsin Public Radio show provides two hours of content each week, each hour focusing on a different theme. TTBOOK is an interview-based showed, usually featuring interviews with authors. (Thus the “BOOK” in TTBOOK.) I find some hours far more interesting than others, of course, but I can credit TTBOOK with introducing me to about a dozen books that I added to my bookcase this past year.

“Chance favors the connected mind,” as Steven Johnson says. I’ve found that by listening to these and other podcasts, I’m more connected to new ideas and perspectives from around the world, and I think that has helped me do my job better. I know for a fact that I’ve included examples and stories from many of these podcasts in workshops and talks I’ve given.

What’s missing from this list? Podcasts about teaching, learning, and education. The NPR Education Podcast is, I think, the only education-focused podcast I subscribe to. I’m not opposed to listening to podcasts that fall squarely within my own field. It’s just that there don’t seem to be that many of them these days. If you know of any good ones, please suggest them in the comments below.