Connecting with Participatory Culture: Clickers and Deep Learning

I’ve scheduled this post to appear on the blog just as I’m starting my keynote at the University of Louisville clickers conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

• For those of you not at the conference, you can get a sense of what I’m talking about right now by checking out my Prezi below.  You’re welcome to weigh in on Twitter about these ideas.  Just tag your tweets with #ULclickers so I’ll see them.
• For those of you at the conference, you’ll find below links to a few resources mentioned in my talk.  Feel free to explore these after the keynote!  (Or during… I’m cool with that.)

My talk is titled “Connecting with Participatory Culture: Clickers and Deep Learning.”  Here’s the abstract:

Today’s students vote for their favorite contestants on American Idol, “like” a friend’s wall post on Facebook, comment on news and events on Twitter, and engage in robust online discussions about World of Warcraft.  We live in a participatory culture, one in which voting, commenting, creating, and sharing are the norm and people prefer being contributors to being consumers.  Teaching with clickers is one way to tap into this culture, engaging students in ways that motivate them to participate during class in meaningful ways.  In this talk, Derek Bruff will explore ways that using clickers connects with our students’ participatory culture and how those connections can be leveraged to promote deep learning.

And here’s my Prezi:

Finally, some relevant resources:

Like Buttons / Student Perspective Questions

• Matthew Freeman’s perspective questions come from this article: 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.  Here’s my summary.

Text-to-Vote / Peer Assessment Questions

• A description of Kori Street’s use of clickers for peer assessment can be found on pages 94-96 of my book.

Serious Fans / Misconception Questions

• The research on World of Warcraft forum discussion can be found here: Steinkuehler, C. & Duncan, S. (2009). Informal scientific reasoning in online virtual worlds. Journal of Science Education & Technology. DOI: 10.1007/s10956-008-9120-8.  See also Constance Steinkuehler’s other research.
• Derek Hansen’s visualizations of edits to Lostpedia, a wiki for the TV show Lost
• The “time for telling” idea comes from this article: Schwartz, D. L., & Bransford, J. D. (1998). A time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16(4), 475-522.
• My misconception question about lie detectors is adapted from Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Event TV / Critical Thinking Questions

• The connection I made between social media (especially Twitter) and “event” TV comes from “Twitter and TV: How Social Media Is Helping Out Old Media,” an essay by James Poniewozik in the March 22, 2010, issue of Time.
• Here’s my post about critical thinking questions in my recent cryptography course.
• Here’s my post about how to adapt Rob MacDougall’s “counterfactual questions” for use with clickers.
• The terms absolutist, relativist, and evaluative come from this article: Kuhn, D. (1992). Thinking as argument. Harvard Education Review 62(2), 155–178.  Similar ideas are found in the work of William Perry and others, captured well in this essay by Richard Felder.

Volunteerism

• I heard about Ushahidi on the World’s Tech Podcast #274, a production of BBC’s The World.  Here are the current Ushahidi reports from Haiti.
• I also heard about Matter of Trust‘s efforts to collect hair and nylons to make hair booms in the World’s Tech Podcast, episode 287.  I highly recommend the World’s Tech Podcast (hosted by Clark Boyd) as a way to learn about “undercovered” tech news.
• The Alphachimp Studio blog has some information on how graphic designers in Nashville have been responding to the recent floods here.  My “We Are Nashville” t-shirt comes from Cool People Care.  And it was Hands on Nashville that’s done a tremendous job of coordinating volunteer efforts in town.

For more on the notion of a participatory culture, read Henry Jenkins’ white paper, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” [PDF].  Also, here’s my blog post that got me started thinking along these lines, the one that references the Campt and Freeman article.

What are your thoughts on the ideas in my keynote?  Do we, especially our students, live in a participatory culture?  What consequences does that have for how we teach?

Image: “skates” by Flickr user marythom / Creative Commons licensed