Clickers and Backchannel at the 2010 Lilly Conference (#lilly10)

I’m attending my very first Lilly Conference this weekend, and I’m pretty excited to be here. I’ve heard so many good things about the Lilly Conferences, so I’m glad to get the chance to experience one firsthand.

I thought I’d post some resources from my keynote last night. First, here’s the Prezi I used during my presentation. As is often the case when I use Prezi for a talk, I had a half dozen people come up to me after the talk and ask about it. I continue to find it an incredibly useful tool for showing the relationships between ideas and convey the “big picture” of what I’m discussing.

And here are some links to further resources about concepts, techniques, and tools I mentioned in my talk:

• Peer Instruction – For more examples of peer instruction, see my blog posts in the “Peer Instruction” category.
• Time for Telling – Here’s the reference for this idea: Schwartz, D. L., & Bransford, J. D. (1998). A time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16(4), 475-522. For more examples of using clickers to create times for telling, see my blog posts in the “Times for Telling” category.
• 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.
• Critical Thinking Questions – I’ve blogged about critical thinking questions in my cryptography course and about Rob MacDougall’s “counterfactual questions” as potential clicker questions. 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.
• Peer Assessment Questions – I blogged about my use of clickers for peer review activities in my writing seminar over at ProfHacker. I picked up the idea from Kori Street at Mount Royal University. A description of Kori’s use of clickers for peer assessment can be found on pages 94-96 of my book.
• Backchannel – I’ve blogged about the use of backchannel in education in the past. You might start with my post titled “Backchannel in Education – Nine Uses” which gives a nice overview of the possibilities. Also, for those not on Twitter, you can still see the backchannel discussion at the Lilly Conference by searching Twitter for the conference hashtag, #lilly10.
• Backchannel Type 1 – Below is “The Twitter Experiment,” the five-minute YouTube video about Monica Rankin’s use of Twitter in her history class at UT-Dallas. Here’s my take on Monica’s use of Twitter.

• Backchannel Type 2 – I mentioned the use of Google Moderator during my talk to collect and prioritize questions for a Q&A period. Here are the results of one such session, a keynote on teaching with clickers I gave at the ESTICT Conference earlier this week.
• Backchannel Type 3 – Gardner Campbell, Ellen Filgo, and one of their students (all from Baylor University) presented at the 2010 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference about their use of Twitter to include Ellen in the class discussion even though she wasn’t physically present. A video of their session is available. You can also read my take on their experiment.
• Student Motivations – For a bit more on the motivations I mentioned in my talk (autonomy, competency, connection, and sharing), see my blog posts on student motivation, particularly this post on Clay Shirky’s treatment of motivation theory in his new book Cognitive Surplus.