Student Engagement: Digital Versus Analog?

Earlier tonight on Twitter…

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/presentationzen/status/112685032375730176″]

I replied:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112695465866297344″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112698465875800064″]

I didn’t really think I would get a reply from Garr (Presentation Zen) Reynolds, but…

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/presentationzen/status/112701240089116674″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/presentationzen/status/112702757877714944″]

Wow! He replied!

The phrase “much better” stood out to me in that first reply. When it comes to engaging students, I don’t see a clear winner in the digital vs. analog fight. I’ll use either to suit my learning objectives.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112703674882600960″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112703860124028930″]

I’ve seen other tweets from Garr Reynolds questioning the utility of Prezi, so I responded to his mention of “trendy, ephemeral digital tools,” too.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112704116354072577″]

Debates over the value of Prezi aside, there’s a deeper issue here: the alignment of teaching practices with learning objectives. I tried to gesture to that in my next tweet:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/derekbruff/status/112704247132459008″]

Reynolds (as of this writing) hasn’t responded to that point. He did, however, retweet my comments about graphic / visual facilitation:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/presentationzen/status/112704650976829440″]

Meanwhile, Frank Noschese had weighed in, and Reynolds retweeted him, too:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/presentationzen/status/112707880075010048″]

Frank’s approach to using whiteboards is very much in line with the graphic / visual facilitation approaches Reynolds and I tweeted about, so it’s not surprising that Reynolds and I both appreciate Frank’s take on whiteboards. And I know Frank wasn’t comparing his whiteboard method with my Prezi method, but I’ll point out that my Prezi method didn’t require any money, beyond what my students and my institution had already paid for laptops and Wifi access points. Since Prezi is free (for basic accounts), I was basically just taking advantage of the tools we had in the room.

I think the most important question raised in this Twitter conversation is the digital vs. analog one. Reynolds seems skeptical of the use of digital tools to engage students. I disagree with him on that, but I don’t think it’s an either-or situation anyway. As I did in my cryptography course, I try to use the instructional methods that will best help me and my students accomplish the learning objectives for a given class session. In the class session on security and privacy, I wanted students to understand the complexity of the arguments around that topic, and having them create a single debate map via Prezi seemed to be a good way to do that. On the final class session, I wanted students to identify for each other the big takeaways from the course, and having them crowdsource those themes via PostIt notes and markers made sense.

What’s your take on the digital vs. analog issue? Or others raised in these tweets?

Image: “Digital Versus Analog?” by me

5 Responses to "Student Engagement: Digital Versus Analog?"

Joss Ives says:

September 11, 2011 at 10:12 am

Derek,

When given the choice between analog and digital of roughly similar pedagogical use and ease of implementation (say clickers vs. flash cards) I will always choose the digital option since it allows a permanent record to be easily created for both my use and the students’. I know there are some digital “add-ons” to analog solutions (such as taking pictures of whiteboards), but I have not had much luck getting students to engage in that sort of greater collaborative community.

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Theresa says:

September 13, 2011 at 11:16 am

Hi Derek,
At CNDLS (cndls.georgetown.edu), we were inspired by your earlier post to try a Prezi Meeting project of our own. A sociology professor wanted our help to figure out a way for her students to create collaborative character maps. Here’s a report on how the project turned out: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/blog/archives/723

In this case, the analog version would have been whiteboards or bulletin boards, but it was great for the students to be able to embed digital images and video. Also, as the previous commenter mentions, it’s really helpful to have an archive of the students’ work.

Thanks for the inspiration!

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derekbruff says:

September 13, 2011 at 8:47 pm

Thanks for the comments, Joss and Theresa. It’s great to hear from some educators about this question, particularly since Garr Reynolds’ experience in higher education is, I think, limited. I greatly admire his work, but I’m not sure how accurate his read is on higher ed pedagogy.

Good points about digital tools making it easier to capture student work for later. That, in turn, makes it easier to share the work, too. I was particularly impressed with the student Prezi linked to from the CNDLS blog post. As I’ve written here before, having our students produce work for “authentic audiences” is incredibly motivating for students.

As Joss notes, it’s possible to capture the products of analog engagement tools, of course. I’m a fan of taking quick photos of whiteboard brainstorming sessions and tweeting those photos to invite more people to the conversation. I’m not sure if our students would as readily share their work with their own social networks when using analog tools, however.

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Clickers in the News | Teaching with Classroom Response Systems says:

September 15, 2011 at 10:28 pm

[…] her (the need for “change ups” in lectures, the opportunity to use student laptops for in-class collaboration, the challenge of teaching students information literacy), although I don’t think I referred […]

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Mac B says:

September 23, 2011 at 1:40 pm

I liked looking through the resources for both conversations. As an elementary teacher the access to the tech isn’t quite up to where it should be so many of those collaborative analog planning techniques are useful. In fact they are built into the RISC system which pulls some of those collaborative tools directly from the mentioned authors. In some ways those tools are currently superior because there isn’t a good electronic duplication.

One particular advantage of the tech though is that, some of the learning and design can take place face to face, but it can also be brought outside the boundaries of the classroom. Someone may be working on it at 2 AM while a group of others at 9 am and the exchanges can continue in an electronically real time archived format. The tech allows the boundaries of the classroom to extend far beyond the walls. That can’t be duplicated via analog in an efficient way.

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