University of Louisville Clickers Conference Update – Clickers and Participatory Culture

As I mentioned recently, I’m giving a keynote talk at the 2nd University of Louisville clickers conference in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 4th.  The early bird registration deadline for the conference is this Thursday, April 15th, so if you’d like to save a little money on your registration fee, you’ve got a couple more days to do so.

Also, I now have a title and description for my keynote talk to share.  My talk is titled “Connecting with Participatory Culture: Clickers and Deep Learning.”  It’s an expansion of some of the ideas I raised in a blog post a while back, along with some ideas from an essay I have coming out on using clickers to promote 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.

I hope that sounds interesting!  I’m having fun putting the talk together.  I’m planning to post some resources related to the talk here on the blog, so stay tuned for those.  Also, I hope there will be an active Twitter backchannel during the conference.  Perhaps #ulclickers as a hashtag?

Image: “141/366: Davids” by Flickr user Bright Star / Creative Commons licensed