Clickers and Participatory Culture, a Free Webinar This Thursday

I’m leading a free webinar from the i>clicker company this Thursday at 12pm Central / 1pm Eastern titled “Connecting with Participatory Culture: Clickers and Deep Learning.” Here’s the description:

Today’s students vote for their favorite contestants on American Idol, “like” a friend’s wall post on Facebook, text each other while watching sports events, 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 session, we’ll explore ways that using clickers connects with our students’ participatory culture and how those connections can be leveraged to promote deep learning.

What is participatory culture? Here’s a definition, from a white paper by Henry Jenkins and colleagues:

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

How can asking multiple-choice questions help create such a culture in a classroom? Find out on Thursday. You can register for the seminar here.

Image: “Circle of Inspiration,” by me, Flickr (CC). Taking up photography as a habit because far more interesting to me when I discovered I could join the thriving photography community on Google+.