Clickers and “A Vision of Students Today”

You may have seen “A Vision of Students Today,” a YouTube video produced by Kansas State University cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and his students. It provides a provocative portrait of undergraduate students and the perspectives on learning they bring to their coursework. Yesterday, Michael Wesch contributed a post to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s “Brave New Classroom 2.0” blog series in which he argued that students find the traditional academic lecture disengaging, in part because they are surrounded by “ubiquitous digital knowledge” easily accessible during class from their laptops and cell phones.

I would argue that classroom response systems, when used to facilitate peer instruction and other student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions, are useful tools for engaging students and moving classrooms from places where information is transmitting to places where knowledge is constructed. You can read more of my thoughts on this topic in my comment on Wesch’s post.

Censi says:

October 21, 2008 at 3:33 pm

Britannica Blog is tightly censored. It doesn’t permit comments incompatible with its ideological or commercial proclivities. It is neither a place for “lively conversation” or uninhibited free and open discussion. It is a site to be shunned as it is “disengaging” and practices “ubiquitous” digital censorship.

Ken Jones says:

November 12, 2008 at 4:07 pm

I actually quote from, “A Vision of Students Today,” in the opening chapter of my proposal. I think you have hit the nail on the head with this. It is certainly fodder for a good debate.

I am looking at clickers from the business side and trying to assess the impacts of the technology itself. Assuming that they are being used in the “best way”… active learning, peer instruction, following best practices… I believe that the technology itself creates some incredible efficiencies that simply cannot be duplicated by other systems (e.g. hand raises, flashcards…).

Does this mean that clickers, by themselves lead to cognitive learning outcomes? I don’t think so. But, I find that much of the education literature downplays these enabling benefits of the technology. Research, like Lasry’s experimental look at flashcards vs. clickers, finds that the technology does not lead to cognitive learning outcomes and reports, “no significant differences”… the pedagogy works without the technology.

As an IS researcher, I don’t think this is fair either. The pedagogy doesn’t work at the same pace, with the same ease, or with the same features and functions without the technology as it does with.

While I believe that the pedagogy and the “activities” drive the train and the clickers do not do the “heavy lifting”, they enable the pedagogy and activities to work and work well. These enabling characteristics are more than mere side benefits of using clickers.

These are just the passionate ramblings of a doctoral candidate, madly writing to finish my proposal!

Thanks
~Ken

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