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Clickers Redefining Classrooms
markmcb writes "It seems that teachers may have a new way to boost classroom participation using a device called a clicker. A clicker is a small handheld device that allows its user to wirelessly respond to various prompts selected by a teacher. So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker. Everything from a simple poll to a graded quiz can be conducted using the device. In the age of cell phones and wireless computers such a technology is likely to be well-received by students, but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."
And what happens when you have 20 clickers in the same room and they screw each other up? :|
(I can just see a student breaking into the wireless network.)
Yeah, we used those at Northwestern last summer in physics. IIRC about 20% of them actually properly recorded the student response. No thanks.
Better than breeding graduates who draw dubious conclusions.
Another way to lower the general standard of peoples' communication skills.
/. doesn't do enough on its own.
I suppose
One of the best parts about class for me is actually speaking my mind and not being afraid to do it. This would just make people more shy if you ask me. Not a very good way to prepare kids for the real world! There won't be clickers at the office.
This is just great. Lets teach our kids how to close their brains even more. Instead of using the wonderfully flexible english language, these kids are going to down to a couple of choices. A, B or C.
Fantastic.
Contrary to what is suggested, I think that it may make graduates more assertive. It would be a good way to get an open discussion going rather than a nerving one. Any poll presented would be seen as an icebreaker for more in-depth and open discussion rather than simply making people less assertive. If anything, this icebreaker would serve to make them more assertive and ready to defend their opinion knowing that other people may share it.
This is a terrible idea. I had to sit through a class at MIT rife with stupid ideas like this. Instead of a normal classroom/lecture setting, where you simply learn at your own pace outside of class or pay attention as suits you, you just sit there and *seethe* and this goddamned clicker thing. You don't really feel the need to concentrate or pay attention because no normal person can come up with 5 legitimate sounding answers for you to choose from.
Maybe this is GREAT for some settings, but this robs students of real interaction with their teachers and replaces it with bullshit polls every 5 minutes. Not appropriate for high school or college, IMHO.
If you want to do this kind of nonsense, the old show-of-hands technique, in my experience, works wonders, provided that instead of assaulting people who get it wrong, you work towards the right answer.
And no, I didn't RTFA.
In a physics course I took at Univ of Arizona, we had these in class. They were supposed to be used as a daily quiz to see if we had actually read. Instead, the system was never properly setup, and there was a fight between the department (which, IMHO, has problems of its own) and the company who made the clickers. The damned things (which cost like $30, IIRC) didn't work til sometime around November, when the course was about to end anyway. And when they "worked", they never recorded student answers properly NOR did they actually record student input. A big waste of time and money - we may as well have used paper and pen. Besides - you run into issues with people bringing two or three clickers for friends.
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues
Sounds like a luddite to me...Who's to say these kids won't be more assertive? Usually they would not talk in class for fear of peer response. I think once they can express their ideas, and see that the response from their peers is not negative, they would probably be more assertive...
It's silly to fear something for a _possible_ negative when it's completely new.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I recently went through the transistion in my previous college to not having these clicker type devices to having them. We call them PRS. Don't remember what it stands for..
But anyways, it takes all the fun out of college. At the beginning of class, the prof will require everyone in attendence to "click" into class. You have to point your unit at some sensors and then via wireless signals the computer records your attendance. Thus, every professor on campus is now taking attendence this way. No fun anymore, because you must attened every class, or your grade automaticaly drops.
Of course, this has it's puropse, and is a great motovational tool. A few of my friends have even reverse eng'ed the deivce and when they're feeling mischivous enough, disrupt the signal enough for the PRS recieving unit to go haywire and throw an error on the screen - thus ending the attendence taking or the quiz taking or what ever. I suspect that these people have learned more from studying the device then any bullshit 2nd/3rd year comp sci course could teach them.
Devices like these are a major form of social control. Awful for educational purposes, at least so says any student who's had to deal with the little bastards.
But then again.. when it comes time for me to be the grad student teaching, I'm sure I'll use it. Damn maturity.
My 0010 cents.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
We used the 'clickers' the engineering physics classes at U.C. Riverside. The clickers boosted class participation somewhat, but there were just people there (like myself) who would take clickers for about 1 to 5 people at times who didn't want to go.
Clickers made sure I learned the material, and made me do well in class. However, it didn't really affect the class participation and attendance. Those who didn't want to go still didn't go - clickers still don't change that. Those who don't care will still do poorly.
The clickers are easily hackable as well I AM SURE, as they are only registered on the system when they fire their serial number to the receiver - and the serial number appears on the large screen telling you that an answer has been registered.
As for the clickers not registering, I don't know what company they were using, but the HITT clickers we used registered 100% of the time.
I actually got stuck in a sample class using these, and I'm not a big fan. What happens is the teacher will ask some multiple-choice question, then he has to stop talking for several minutes while he switches to the clicker server program. The whole class strains and points and tries to get the sensors in the room to pick up their answer. There isn't any indication if it was *your* clicker which was picked up by the sensor though, so everyone just keeps clicking. They have to constantly check the screen to make sure that their number was picked up - which doesn't always happen.
Maybe it's just because they're new, but the teachers I had tried to avoid using the clickers for points. I'm sure the teachers got some decent feedback - knowing what people understood and didn't. Then again, they were in my physics classes, so it was easy to formulate questions and get responses in a "short" amount of time. I certainly appreciated that over homework questions. It did help once or twice to let me know I misunderstood something, but overall, they were very frustrating, and grew to be one of my pet peeves.
I had to use these 3 years ago at Vanderbilt for the first semester of physics. Our teacher had a couple prompts throughout the day that we were graded on. The funny thing is that the professor would put in his answer with his clicker and would put his back to the class while doing so; therefore, he allowed us to pretty much see the answer every time. We were actually graded on correct answers, but other sections were merely graded on participation. Nobody wanted to go to the worthless 8:10am lecture, so groups were formed with clicker duty. It was rather amusing seeing someone try to get 5 or 6 clickers to register before the quiz timed out. Basically I think my university used/uses it as a method to make kids go to class... bah
I used these in social science class in 1992 in Sweden, they weren't wireless though of course. I was 16 at the time ("Gymnasiet" in Sweden, not sure what it is called in other countries - secondary high?)
Quite fun, we students got to write yes/no questions and passed them to the teacher, she selected the most interesting ones. I would have been interested to see the answer to the question "Do you consider yourself gay or bi", but I chickened out.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Cliquers either, don't understand them much too.
I was never one to shy away from answering questions in class, and I'd answer my classmate's questions too if they wanted help and the teacher was busy. One time a classmate asked in social studies, "What's pre-contact?" in reference to the pre-Columbian period in North America. I looked at her with a straight face, and said, "foreplay".
If you get something wrong, it isn't the end of the world, you aren't controlling the shuttle, you're in grade 10 math class. Ask questions, it helps me stay awake in class too.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
From the stories I heard in customer service lines at the bookstore, they were not popular. One problem was that they hadn't standardized yet, and students had to buy multiple incompatible devices or, worse yet, the model they needed wasn't available.
At least at the University level, people seem to think "kinda cool, but mostly overrated". The only real purpose I've heard is to require attendance/primitive participation.
These might be popular in elementary/middle school though. We had a couple "quiz show" systems when I went to school. Used sparingly, I remember enjoying them (when they worked). Used daily, they'd probably become boring fast.
Another article (don't remember the source) discussed using cell phone messaging for similar purposes. That almost seems reasonable, excepting that not everyone can afford one.
Isn't this just saying it's the student's fault for not participating?
The problems in education tend to be a lack of challenge, engagement, and teaching how to solve problems. The way I see it, this could help with the engagement issue but only if clicking correctly contributes to your grade. Otherwise, teachers should pose interesting challenges and work on problem solving...then we'll have an educational experience we can be proud of.
I see every major corporation in America backing these things!
... they're better than the Clappers we used when I went to school.
Now, if we got to use the crapper, that'd be OK.
It seems that teachers may have a new way to boost classroom participation using a device called a STUN GUN.
'Nuff said.
We used these in my Physics (university Calc-based) class... They didn't work very well. We had a lot of issues with them, usually just that some of the clicks wouldn't register on the professor's computer.
They did have cool automatic graphs, though.
A) Empty classrooms with mysteriously full attendance.
B) "clicking tools" now loaded in the standard Auditor distro -- everyone in your frat mysteriously gets all the right answers to the quiz; complaints from the rich kids about their fancy Cross ClickBen getting "Clikjacked".
C) Quiz designed to overcome high school shyness about sexual topics mysteriously reveals entire cheerleadng squad turns out for backdoor antics with donkeys.
D) Awkward Teacher/Student and Student/STudent interaction replaced with Awkward User/Technology interaction.
In our CS173 class, the remotes' main use was simply taking attendance, which was for a grade. So, for two minutes, everyone would frantically click their (and their absentee buddy's) remotes, and a queue would form by the teacher's desk for the people whose remote didn't work. The feedback that your press was registered was poor because not all students are shown on the screen at the same time. If they just wanted to take attendance (something I disagree with, but anyway...), it would be more efficient and more secure against cheating to just swipe our student IDs at the door. (The other attendence scheme the CS department subjected us to was passing around WiFi-enabled palmtop computers and having us log on to a website. Whatever happened to K.I.S.S.?)
When the remotes are actually used during instruction, they're not any more useful than a show of hands. Granted, there's nothing too discrete about discrete math answers, but in my highschool sex ed class, we didn't have a problem with just writing embarrasing questions ("can you live without your penis?") on notecards, and we could have voted that way if we were so inclined. The feature our teacher was most fond of was the ability to pick on a student at random - again, something that can easily be done without the remotes.
In my opinion, the remotes were just more trouble than they were worth.
I have installed many of the systems threw out a school system. I can tell you if your lessons are planned around it they can be an effective tool for elementry kids but for college i just do not see the use of them
For me in my USC Physics class we just gave 10 of our clickers to one person and rotated who went to class when. I gladly took the vacation from class in exchange for 90 minutes pressing buttons on nearly a dozen devices once every two weeks. A good idea but as with all technology in the classroom it can be exploited quite easily.
I majored in Japanese and CS in college (at a university with very small average class sizes compared to large state schools like the ones in the article). The difference between a 12-man discussion section and a 90-man lecture is like night and day. When there are 12 you can tailor your lessons to the room and if Billy is skipping class or obviously not getting the material despite trying you will know, instantly. When there are 90, you probably get to know those 5 kids who are really too good to be in this class and those 10 who use every trick in the book to avoid getting out of doing assignments, and for the 75 students in the middle you're lucky if you even know their names. (My best CS professor, ever, had academic standards about as sharp as a butter knife and lecturers which did not succeed in imparting much material but he knew *every* kid in the class and worked the labs like it was his job to the point where he knew some of the 15 team's project status better than the lazier team members did -- nothing says "I care" like "Hey, Bob, how's it going? Did you guys get that regexp engine working right for the poetry project yet? Time's a wasting, remember there are other ways to skin the cat. Anyhow, if you need to chat about it come see me after class or on Thursday. Hey Suzy! I loved the design on the last project but this is AI, not the perl obfuscation contest. More comments on the magic bits next time, OK? Hey Joe! I haven't seen you in three weeks?. Should I be concerned or is this just 'This is not a class I care for?' in which case I can just give you a B- and write you off?")
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I can just see it now:
CEO: "Bob, what do you think of my highly controverisal proposial for the realignment of the company?"
Bob: Click!
CEO: "What the hell does that mean?"
Bob: Click!
CEO: "I see. Well it seems Bob here isn't afraid to speak up like the rest of you spineless SOB's . You're all fired; Bob - you're my new Number 2"
Bob: Click!
Ok, perhaps they face a brighter future than I imagined. Where can I get this clicker retraining, and is there a clicker conference soon?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think that most people who do not speak up in class do so most often out of the fear of proving themselves stupid infront of their peers.
People who are afraid to voice unpopular opinions will probably not be made more bold in any event.
I recall watching a tv special about the use of this sort of device. One trend was that when used in a "Do you understand" type of question, the teacher can get a much better idea about how well the lesson is being understood, and can go over it again.
END COMMUNICATION
As a student who sometimes is forced to purchase one of these devices for some introductory physics and economics classes, they are more trouble than they are worth. First, they usually cost $30 (unless you can buy it from someone who just took the class for a discount,) and are primarily used for attendance (a.k.a. participation grade.) Second, the questions asked during class weren't helpful if you answered incorrectly because there would not be any useful feedback afterwards (i.e. the misconception that led you to the wrong answer.) Lastly, it would be a miracle if the professor or the TA could get the quizzes working at all.
As a course assistant for a introductory computer science course, however, I know how painfully difficult it is to get feedback from the class in terms of how well the professor or I am teaching the material and how well the students are learning it. No one ever wants to be "that kid" who admits in front of 450 other students that he or she just doesn't get what's on the board. No matter how much you tell them that their feedback is crucial to our effectiveness as instructors, their knowledge that we determine their final grade inhibits them from being honest. The only way to secure honest feedback from them is during the end-of-term evals, but by then it's too late to do anything constructive with the feedback.
For instructors, this system would be great in terms of getting real-time feedback about how the current lecture is going (i.e. something simple as a green/yellow/red feedback system would work.) It doesn't help me to see blank faces stare at me when I ask them if there are any questions about the material I just presented; it tells me nothing if they understand, are completely confused, or just plained bored (usually, it's a mixture of all three dispersed throughout the class.) However, if they could anonymously indicate that they are not following me, I can rapidly change my approach to adapt my teaching to better suit their needs. It might not be perfect, but if it can help me reach out to students that I wasn't able to reach out to before, it's worth me giving it a shot.
We have some things similar to those at my high school, and while we rarely use them(maybe three or four times a year), I think they're atleast fairly useful. We've used them a few times for reviewing for state assessments/finals. It makes sure that people don't just sit around and jack off for an hour(the ones we have show what #'s have answered). They aren't perfect as far as reception, but they're not too bad. I think ours are infared or something of that nature. They let the teachers know what questions/topics people are having trouble on as well as the students. And most of us like using them, its more fun then filling in bubbles on a sheet.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Ok, so they give you an instantaneous view of the makeup of the class. Wonderful. They still don't give you the reasons for that makeup, or why the students might feel its important or not. Seems like a waste of money which might otherwise be spent to further educate the educators.
Two of my law school profs used these (although it was before I arrived). They co-wrote a paper on it called "Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning".
Their experience was part of a NY Times story in early 2004. (Story text from law school to avoid registration.)
If anyone wants more information on Prof. Caron and Dr. Gely's experience with these you can read the aforementioned paper.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
> less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues.
I think they already exist. I believe they are called Democrats. Others call themselves journalists.
Kinda sad that these days the most accurate and brave reporting is done by The Daily Show on a comedy cable channel.
I had these clickers in my Physics class last year at Northeastern University. It took a month just for the professor to figure out how to use the reciever with his Power Point. Then the recievers in class often failed, so only half the class could get their answers in. At the end of the semester we would just take turns who was going to class for the day and that person would take all the clickers and respond for us. At the end of the semester, the credit for the clicker answers was just erased, and we all got full credit. Totally worth the $30 we had to pay for the remote... not.
e.g. "I disagree with idea X because it would negatively impact Y's ability to..."
or even "X is so not cool."
We can already do this with paper, but handwriting differences interfere with anonymity, and it can be difficult to engage in discussion this way rather than just giving single answers.
So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker.
...
Just think how useful, informative, and accurate they'll be
... just like the slashdot polls!
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
It might add a "bored students spend lecture period trying to break their desk-clicker" problem... but that could be addressed by making the input hardware near-indestructible (or by publicly drawing and quartering the first vandal of the year, as an example to the others)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think in some instances they might be alright.. Maybe they can introduce them into the Houses of parliament we might get somewhere then!
On the contrary. The anonymity will end up, at least for some, to break out of their shell, so-to-speak. It will allow some students to speak their mind without fear, but additionally, will end up giving them more courage when they see that there was nothing to fear in the first place.
We got these in one of my grad school classes last semester. Yes, the recievers are crap and it is hard to see if you logged in correctly.
BUT: for one particular situation they actually worked surprisingly well: seeing how well the lecture was getting through to non-native english speakers.
This environmental health class was a requirement for everyone at the school of public health and as such you had all the foreign people from the health ministry of ghana and mongolia from the international health department or the chinese aids workers from the epidimeology dept. Who really only had to read technical english during the day and whose conversational english was somewhat lacking.
Basically the class met once a week for a few hours and every 90 mimutes or so the professor would structure a break with 2 or 3 review questions that were really just to see if you understood what she was saying, no higher level thought at all. You could totally tell when people didn't get it and you knew from the way the question was asked that the only way people would get the answer wrong was:
A) They were being jerks and thought it would be funny to pick the Cowboyneal option
or
B) They had sat through a lecture on cancer clusters on Cape Cod and didn't what/where Cape Cod was.
Conclusions: These things are a terrible way to grade people, take attendance, or foster debate. They are a GOOD way to see if your audience understood any of the previous 90 minutes.
For a student, biggest problem was figuring out whether or not the system recorded your answer. Upon a successful transmission, the system displayed a personal confirmation code on the classroom projector. Alas, it could only display around 30 codes before the oldest one was overwritten. With 70 other students in each group frantically submitting and resubmitting their answer, finding your confirmation code on the screen before it got overwritten was a matter of looking at the right place at the right time.
Repeat this two more times for a class of ~200 and the whole thing took 5-10 minutes... for a single question! The teacher eventually decided that the system was too unreliable and slow and used it only for a few bonus-point quizzes so that it wouldn't hurt our grade.
for graded chemistry tests in highschool, I must say they are actually not very good. They seemed to work reliably enough, but it was frustrating to not be able to see if it actually recorded your answer correctly. I personally had no issues with the system, but 95% of the class hated it.
Is it a coincidence that clicker is a euphemism for pussy?
We used these in my Physics class at Utah Valley State College and I found that they were put to good use. My prof would start each class period with a simple quiz to see if people had read the assigned pages from the textbook as well as to take attendance. We didn't have to buy our rent the clickers - the department bought forty of them and they stayed as part of the room and were used by several classes each day. We were assigned our clickers at the beginning of the semester (they had numbers on them) and those were ours for the rest of the class. The only problem we ever had with them was when the teacher's laptop died and we had to take the quiz on paper (gasp!) for a week. I found that they worked quite well the way my prof was using them. Although, had I been required to purchase one to use only to take a daily quiz...I might have been a little pissed off. As it was there was no extra cost involved in using them.
This space for rent...
I'm the most withdrawn and ineffectual person in my class and this device will really empower me to make my opinions matter.
do they support the CowboyNeal option?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Oh yeah, what the classroom really needs is anonymous comments from students.
Best way I found of boosting classroom participation was chocolate fish. Ask a question, whoever answered it correctly got a chocolate fish.
I even started giving them out for reasonable attempts at the answer, to encourage people to put their hand up and try. So long as they had a reasonable explanation for the answer they gave, they were rewarded.
Eh, I hate these devices. I'm a student at UC Berkeley right now, they actually give extra-credit to those who participate. It's really unfair, I received an A in my CS class but not an A+ because I neglected to use the PRS device... He only gave students A+'s who used PRS device (which he felt participated more).
- Ryan
The "P.O.S." devices used in mainly physics courses are expensive and over rated. $30+ for an infrared 'clicker' we'll use in one or two classes. Professors used to take attendance via these devices until the system was abused. Judging from my glorious passing grade I'd say the prof did something right. I'm just not sure that it was the 'clicker' and his poorly worded questionnaires.
Just one? Siiigh, here I go, likely to get modded flamebait, but what the hell. I've talked to numerous MIT students (ranging from current undergrads, to PhD's) in several different fields (mechanical engineering, electronics, etc). I also worked for MIT (see below).
MIT is "rife", like many "top" schools, with professors who barely show up for the classes they supposedly "teach". TA's run the class, do the grading, and interact with the students. Meanwhile, the professors are busy doing the traditional MIT professor path: invent something, patent it, form a company, get rich off it. MIT has an entire office full of patent attorneys, called the Technology Licensing Office- where I worked for a bit. They measure revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars. MIT has turned into an R&D mill; the Media Lab is a perfect example. MIT's best and brightest from the Media Lab have turned out...a shag-rug-covered alarm clock that rolls off the table when you hit the snooze button. Slightly clever, very half-baked, and utterly lacking in anything even remotely approaching state of the art in -any- field. But it's from an MIT student, from the Media Lab no less, and their shit is gold and smells of rose blossoms- so it gets local, national, and international coverage, and nobody says "hey, this is just an alarm clock with two wheels and motors that turn on for a random bit of time". Ie, something a smart 8th grader could make.
I went to a college where I was on a first name basis with my CS professors, their significant others...even knew their kids, and I'd bump into them on campus at concerts and stuff. I could, during their fairly wide office hours, walk into their office, plop down on the couch, and ask them questions about the current homework assignment or project. I knew most of the kids in my classes (the largest, an "intro" level class, was 25 people). You know what? I actually learned stuff, and not just what was in my textbook.
Maybe if MIT professors actually taught their classes, class size would be smaller, students would feel more involved (and hence as questions more often during a lecture) and the quality of the lecture would be such that fewer questions would be necessary in the first place.
Some will argue that MIT's professors, focusing on research, are its strength. Except to undergrads, they'll never get even close to this state-of-the-art research. The professors who come up with truly revolutionary stuff are usually the furthest removed from students. "Top" schools all sell the same lie the armed forced do- "join us, work on cutting edge stuff!" Well, funny thing that you join, and find yourself cleaning lab equipment. Hey, it's a step up from cleaning toilets in the Air Force general's jet, I guess.
Want a perfect example of MIT's failure to educate its graduates with real-world, useful skills? The recent underwater vehicle competition where a bunch of barely-literate high school students from a poor texas immigrant community beat the MIT team.
Please help metamoderate.
In School...
Teacher: "Who thinks they have the answer?"
Me: *click*
Teacher: "Okay, d474, what do you think it is?"
Me: *click* *click*, *clickity* *click*
Teacher: "No, that's wrong d474."
Me: *cli* *click* *CLICK*!
Teacher: "Excuse me young man, what did you just say!? You better go to the principles office, NOW!"
Me: *click* *click* - *cLiCk*
(students laugh as I leave the room)
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
"[...] one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."
Train, possibly. Breed, yeesh!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
cooldude_2671@yahoo.com
This might work up until grade 4 or 5. After that the smart-alecks will make a big joke of it. The whole class can get "in" on it. They will click the answer that is either the most outrageous, the one potentially the most humorous, or the one diametrically opposed to what they truly think. Come on! It's a great idea, don't get me wrong, but human nature being what it is I don't think anyone can realistically expect students to take it seriously. Haven't you ever seen Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? There are always some jokers in the studio audience who vote for the wrong answer ON PURPOSE. It will become endemic. If it's truly anonymous teachers won't be able to figure out who the trouble makers are, and it really won't matter because most of the kids will be snickering and participating in the hoax. I can see it now:
Q. Who was the most influential person of the 20th Century?
A. Pope John Paul II
B. Franklin Roosevelt
C. Ronald Wilson Reagan
D. Ghandi
E. Hitler
When 90% of the class votes "E" and 100% of the class is cracking up these devices will last a month at most.
We trie these at a large Australian university. The reason we rejected them was simply because people don't interact like this in the 'real world'. Imagine presenting a new idea to a client and having your intern or assistant interact with the client with one of these things.
Students can participate or not, just like the real world. Occasionally, there are negative consequences to that participation. Part of the learning and maturing process is to work out how, why and when to participate. That's life!
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Just reading the testimonials from former students using this technology is horrifying.
What are we becoming?
Before I chose my major of Comp. Eng., I had to take a speech class as part of my liberal arts requirement. Later, in engineering school, I saw seniors who couldn't even present their right answer in front of the class. I guess this is just one more technology to let the Prof do anything but teach, and to make the students just sit and absorb, sit and absorb.
Now we have a nation of university grads who don't know how to present, defend, or discuss their ideas in front of a group. True future captains of industry. True leaders in the complex, competitive, corporate world of tomorrow.
Sad, sad, sad.
I have used these for a couple of years in some of my intro geology courses. The companies want you to use them for quizzing/testing, but I haven't found that to be feasible in my large (120-150 student) courses. In my smaller courses I don't see a real benefit to them, because I have enough direct responses in the small-group setting. In order to use them for quizzing, you have to either:
1) Hand them out once at the beginning of the course, record who has which one, hope they bring them daily, hope they haven't been destroyed in the bottom of a backpack, and hope they haven't switched with a friend; or
2) Hand them out at the beginning of each class session you want to use them for, and somehow record who has each one. This would likely take most of the class time just recording who has each gadget!
I have found them to be mostly useful in terms of the "gee-whiz" factor. Students respond positively on evaluations, but I've found no correlation between the use of these gadgets and student learning. I still use them in about 20% of my class sessions for the intro class.
Would be handy for simple votes. Teacher explains something and then asks everybody to click yes/no if they understood to see if they should go back and explain it better.
Nobody likes to stick up their hand and say they didn't understand - but when you didn't you can be pretty sure a large number of other people didn't either.
What a completely shite idea. What kind of idiot would come up with something like this?
If the teacher's shite and doesn't engage the pupils, having some stupid clicker won't make a blind bit of difference to the attention they pay.
next.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Isn't a clicker something that is used when training dogs..? ;-)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
this is one of the problems that could be solved if we all had non-duplicatable, non-removable, non-transferable world wide ID cards. the clickers would work using the worldID as a security key.
Useless in my experience in physics classes at Stanford. I haven't seen one thing it can do that raising hands wouldn't accomplish, except take an exact tally of attendance (and the profs tire of using the devices for even that).
I mean, technically it's cool. But its promoting a behaviour of not being able to communicate honestly with each other in meatspace, and it's totally anti-social.
And you've got to ask, if they make it so you can answer anything without fear of peer feedback, does that make it easier for them to ask anything? Is the outcome in the end that the questions themselves become socially unacceptable?
but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues
Fine by me. America could use a few less vocal people on sensitive issues. Plus, it means my (very vocal) opinions count more!
The idea of giving students in a classroom buttons to push is hardly new. It has been around for at least 40 years. I first encountered it in 1974 at the BBC Engineering Training Centre. The British Post Office used the same idea for technical training as far back as the 1960s.
The idea is that a lecture can be broken into modules, and the lecturer can then ask multiple choice questions using the buttons to find out whether the students have understood the module. If he gets a sea of green lights on his console, he knows that most or all of the students understood it. If he gets lots of red lights, he knows he didn't get the module across very well and tries again. If a particular student does badly, he can be given extra assistance.
All of this was implemented in very simple electrical hardware - just switches and lamps.
Me, having the biggest mouth in existance, wouldnot be able to keep shut about things like politics.
Students aren't that immature though.
So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker. Everything from a simple poll to a graded quiz can be conducted using the device.
what's the point of grading a quiz that was submitted by anonymous students? or is there a way to switch the anonymous function on and off. if there is, would you really feel that anonymous when you use that clicker?
HD Trailers
We're testing them this summer in a smaller class at university level.
IR: don't bother, unless a tiny class in a tiny classroom.
RF: works great, 200+ students OK, manufacturer software (for multiple choice, grading, layout) makes a big difference- it's a pretty new field and honestly some of these companies have no clue as to what would work in a classroom, and what will not.
The company we are working with is very responsive and I'd guess in 3-4 months will have tweeked things in software to make us happy. Goal is to use in 400 student courses so some kinda klunky things (data entry, formatting, etc) that would work for small groups (not suck up much instructor time "fixing") are a huge issue with large groups.
It's a good tech. Early adopters will have to spend a little time.
Really avoid the IR except for very small groups, though.
Finally, a proven method for training students. Hopefully this will replace the current method of professors using choke chains when a student answers a question wrong.
We had a tech demo and stress test of these over this summer here at Cornell. The clickers themselves were the new RF ones and worked fine, even when we had all 500 people hit the same answer. I can't say the same of the software, which was a buggy Powerpoint add-in with a habit of misaligning it's "right answer" circle if the slide layout was changed at all after the polling questions were put in.
From what the professors there were saying, they didn't see a real use for them other than taking attendance, and even then, they didn't seem hugely fond of them. The only ones that seemed interested in using them for quizzing were all (I'm pretty sure), history and other social science professors, not any of my engineering ones.
From summary:
Yes, because a student is certainly going to trust that a device supplied by the teacher is going to protect his anonymity, instead of reporting him as a dangerous terrorist commie pervert.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Watch out for the quit ones, there plotting against you. Maybe the clicker is intended to give the quiet ones a voice and prevent terrorism.
Actually, the use of personal response devices can greatly ENCOURAGE discussion/conversation. This method is used in the physics dept at Harvard by Prof Mazur (mazur-www.harvard.edu). The whole process is not just selecting a multiple choice answer - but choosing your answer, and then discussing this with your peers and determine which answer is correct (also teaches you to argue/debate well). After a minute or two to discuss, everyone votes again and you see how the answer percentages have changed. Then the professor talks about the how to arrive at the correct solution (and all the little traps that distracted those that chose the alternative wrong answers).
Certain professors during lectures regulary stop and ask if everyone understands everything but nobody really has the guts to stand up and admit his stupid to follow whats being said.
Instead I'd propose installing at each desk a button which when pressed would cause a special device to administer a mild electirc shock. If more students start pressing their buttons the greater the charge would get. With that sort of instant feedback the lecturer would where he needs to go into greater details.
...one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues.
I don't think the current system promote assertiveness, I think it rewards people who are naturally assertive. A clicker enables the shy and timid to validate their feelings, rather than feeling compelled to validate the view of dominant predjudices. Knowing that you're not alone is the first step towards being comfortable with who you are and how you feel.
And if a clicker helps you to discover that you are in fact alone in your views, well, that's useful too. More useful than feeling like you're being deliberately isolated by the more assertive members of your group. It makes it much harder to formulate resentments which may fester into hostility toward those who you (wrongly) feel are singling you out.
So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker.
Yeah, just what we need -- more sex, religion and politics in the classroom.
These are all topics that require maturity before they can be understood. If kids are too embarrased to answer questions about such topics, then they're not ready to be learning about them. And I don't see how personal questions like the examples given in TFA fit into the curriculum.
The device is great -- instant feedback on a large scale can have its uses in the classroom. But the ability to avoid touchy subjects isn't one of them.
Kids these days.
/graduated highschool in 02
In my day, we had to raise our hands... until we lost circulation.
In the rain and snow too!
bah... kida today.
our tendency to pick the easiest, fastest, least-thought-required solution to problem ...like your knee-jerk reaction to something you've never given any serious attention? Really, how much thought have you put into this?
I TAed an upper division CS class at Berkeley where we used these things.
The professor liked them and he'd do short, ungraded quizzes with them once or twice a lecture. It helped break up the class and gave the students more to do during a lecture than listen, take notes, and ask/hear a couple of questions.
Technically the clickers weren't really up to snuff; they'd have trouble recording responses, especially if multiple people answered simultaneously. But overall they seemed like a pretty good idea if used properly.
And they say morse code will die if the FCC doesn't require hams to know code on HF...
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Using special receivers connected to their laptops, instructors were able to instantly gather responses to personal yes-or-no questions
As if American culture isn't shallow enough already, we are going to condition students to think everything has a "yes" or "no" answer that can be tallied by a clicker?
And at the university level?
I can remember when examinations had multiple choice or matching questions. Some, horror of horrors, even required essays stating a position and defending it.
Does it click?
No?
THEN DONT CALL IT A CLICKER.
Stupidest name ever.
It's the dedicated professors who are most susceptible to these things, but hopefully they'll also be the first to see how useless the devices are in practice.
I had a very dedicated, very accessible, not very good at imparting knowledge professor at my Uni who bought into the clicker idea. The result was a degradation of the lectures into click fests. Of course he could still be reached during office hours, or pretty much any time he wasn't actively lecturing. And I'm sure that many students learned a lot because of that accessibility but no one learned any more due to the clickers.
The Clicker doesn't have to take away from class participation; you can still have mandatory class discussion or presentations.Moreover, as stated in the article, that clicker will allow people to participate who would normally not.
Personally, I think that the clicker has a great potential; both to teach and to cheat.
When a student is willing to speak up and explain how they reached an incorrect or dubious conclusion, the professor can walk them through the logic and help find the error.
This is one of the primary functions of a university level course - teaching students how to teach themselves. An authoritative conclusion isn't particularly valuable if the method of reaching that conclusion cannot be replicated by the students. So called 'clickers' do nothing to help students synthesize data and experience into valid conclusions.
For a moment I though that was the same thing I used to train cats and dogs with... "C'mon student, fetch... , good student, there's your cookie..."
Vi havas e-poston.
I think..... I can't do this......
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
A device that can be used as a testing device can't be trusted by the student as an anonymous "poll taking device". Without this trust, any data obtained is invalid. Good randomized response techniques, used by statisticians, use a method that the the responder can trust and validate with his own knowledge so that the responder can really feel anonymous. An example of this is letting the person answer one of two questions, one non-sensitive and the other not. The person chooses which to answer based by the number that comes up on a pair of rolled dice, which the poll-taker can't see. If the odds aren't even, the statistician has the mathematical knowledge to estimate the answer if he uses a large enough sample. The person can test the dice, and can use his own observation to validate the method.
The government sure hopes so. :-)
As someone who has used these things from the other side (yes, I teach at a university, physics and astronomy actually), I think they are a symptom of a larger problem. Universities today (especially state ones) are increasingly pressuring professors to do more with less. Funding is being cut across the board, with the burdon being shifted to students to a larger and larger degree in tuition and fees, but this generally does not make up for the budget shortfall. Larger class sizes are a direct consequence of this. Most professors who actually care about the quality of their teaching are being forced into this situation even at schools where "small class size" is a selling point - many are looking for a magic bullet that will make them feel like they are doing as good a job with their large class as they were with the smaller ones. IMHO, it can't be done. Smaller classes and personal interaction are the only things that significantly improve students' performance, mostly because they are willing to work harder. Certainly, access to the professor is a big part of it, but I think that there is also a fear of letting down a professor that they see as a friend or role model. This certainly has been my experience. FWIW, I have stopped using the clickers, even in my large astronomy classes. Assuring the students that "Being wrong with conviction is better than being right on accident" seems to help somewhat with the old show of hands method. :)
So basically we're finally catching up to the audience voting technology from America's Funniest Home Videos from the 1990s. Or is it more advanced like "Ask the Audience" from Who Wants to be a Millionaire with crazy coloured bar graphs and one guy that always votes for the most obviously wrong answer?
Rapidly approaching the Zener knee...
Obviously not everyone has a computer in all classes, but if it's a course being taught in a lab, or if your school gives students laptops (as mine does), then it's not so far-fetched.
Rather than using something that sounds like it's full of bugs, why not write a 2-line CGI app and do 'polls'? You don't have to keep clicking and pointing. You can do more than A/B/C/D, even.
I'm still not sure that technology is what's going to 'fix' education. But I do think that, if we're going to use technology, we could at least do it right.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."
I don't think this device can do anything worse than what forced, mandatory public schooling has done. Think about this from the point of view of government as a general concept. At home, a child is familiar with one form of government: dictatorship--do what you're told, or else. At school, what form of government do we have? Dictatorship as well, but on a much more massive scale with a hierarchy that is more similar to that of a corporation (hey, wait...). For the first 18ish years of most peoples' lives, they are "kept down" by somebody, whether their parents or their school, and they're only "kept up" by their friends around them. Then we give them the "right" to vote and wonder why they don't use it. Perhaps it's because we have this long history of totally denying children the right to, well, anything, and it takes them a good four years in college and four to six more years after that to un-learn all the damage the oppression of public schooling has provided so that they can get out and finally voice their opinion. Of course, if they skip college, they're perfect little unquestioning factory-worker automatons, just like the public school experiment wanted them to be. (ponder for a moment that our factory jobs are being shipped overseas and the notion of forced schooling is many decades out of fashion because it trains people for jobs and social environments which are rapidly dwindling in number)
I really don't think giving people a clicker so they can answer sensitive questions is a bad thing. I think the entire environment where 30 people mindlessly follow a single adult (that's what a classroom is in a modern public school. 1 commander, 30 soldiers...) is what totally ruins our children.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I know the article focused on using the "clickers" in college level courses but they are being introduced and used quite successfully at lower education levels as well. I teach Kindergarten and use them with my students from time to time. In the smaller classroom setting, I have no more than 22 students, there aren't any problems with the signal not working or with the device recording the responses inaccurately. These "clickers" have been an excellent way to get all children actively involved in the classroom discussions and it is a very simple way for me as the teacher to get a quick check on what percentage of the class is "getting it". Just thought I would offer a slightly different viewpoint - the "clickers" are getting children excited not only about using technology, which is very important, but also about the learning!!
Speaking as an academic tech guy, anyone wanting to do graded quizzes with these is insane. (Although we run faculty meeting votes with them and see *none* of the problems everyone seems to have- we get votes for ~80 people in about 20 seconds, with clear "your vote is counted" feedback for every user. Replace the batteries every now and then and make sure you have enough receivers.) There's just no point- paper is easier.
Where they work is in "Just-in-time" teaching techniques and instant feedback. One great example- a physics prof where I work was teaching 101-level gravitation to a bunch of students. He asked a question about weightlessness, and every single student got it wrong. Not only did he know quickly that nobody had understood the last ten minutes of lecture, but he knew where the confusion was based on the answers.
Can you do this without them, just using hands? Well, actually no- he's tried that. Most of the students won't answer, those few that do just look for the hand of the girl in the front row with the 99.7% average and answer along with her. You need the anonymity to get effective use
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
One also can't help but wonder if it would lead to people expressing opinions anonymously that they would might be SHAMED out of expressing if they had to do it to your face. Racist sentiments come to mind, for example. If this were used to shape laws and policies, it could be a dangerous thing. Some opinions don't need to be heard - and even their holders know it....
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
I took this psych course last term and the prof, Dr. Tim Pychyl, used a set of IR clickers to ask about 6-7 questions per class. He had used them in previous classes, and IIRC he actually paid for the system out of his own pocket.
His approach was to close a chapter or topic by asking some fundamental questions about what we had just covered, just to make sure we at least had the basics firmly ingrained. Polling the class was done in one minute as he distributed about 30 clickers to groups of 2-3 students, who could decided amongst themselves what the best answer was. (Keeping it down to 6-7 questions per class allowed everyone a bit of a rest from the lecture without causing us to lose interest as the room waited for a bunch of people to make their decisions)
After polling, we could all see a bar graph of the responses and he would take a few minutes to point out the correct answer and explain why the others were sort of right, but not all the way. I found it really helped get everyone on track... If you were right, you got a little confidence boost. If you were wrong, you were the only one who knew it, and the prof's explanation was enough to clear it up for you.
If any of you folks have a chance to take a class with Tim, I'd highly recommend it.
- DasBub
At the University of British Columbia, we had these.
By the way, PRS stands for Personal Response System.
I've seen a TV program on the ideal system, where they had a bunch of cheap PDAs in bin by the door; pick one up on the way in, and drop it off on the way out. It was guaranteed to be anonymous that way, so there was no need or desire to cheat. No grade was assigned to the output, which took the stress away. The goal was to let the prof know if he was getting his point across, so he could try again in a different way before anyone got left behind.
At UBC, they made it part of your grade (5%), and you had to buy one. There were reliability issues, and the tests were time-limited and stressful, and so they didn't help as much as they could have.
Newflash: Short-sighted professors or department heads cause promising technology to fail, film at eleven!
In my experience, "finding my voice" was the whole point of college. Study was merely a tool to that end. (And, indeed, I went to a state-run college.)
The people I know who didn't go find communication and focusing difficult. Even among my parents' generation, the people I know who didn't go to college are less likely to speak up and more likely to mouth off. This leads me to believe that more education means more individualism and initiative.
In my experience, having more people with those traits actually makes society work better. The more viewpoints there are, and the better articulated they are, the more precisely we are able to figure out what should be done. Just as a child who is exposed to a greater number of religions tends to have a more reasonable religious attitude, a person who hears a panoply of opinion tends toward reasonable opinions. Society is more likely to be "torn apart" when ideological bullies dominate the playground. Or do you really believe that the Red Scare or the Salem witch trials represented the pinnacle of societal health?
But then again, you must be right. The whole point of education is just to make you cry. No point in trying then, I suppose. A real shame.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
At my school we often have classes that involve use of a clicker. They really just complicate things more than anything.
Half of the time, an application crashes or the teacher is seriously slowed down by the process. The rest of the time, most of the class (even if they have the clicker) does not respond out of sheer laziness.
We had these in my Physics class and they would only work half of the time. Worse of all, they would use the number of responses you gave for your participation grade. When they work, they are actually helpful in telling the professor that nobody has understood what he/she was talking about.
We use this at my university (University of Texas at Austin). It's been around for a few years, and it is most definitely not anonymous. Some professors (physics) use it for attendance, and that's about it. Students do NOT take to this, 99.9 students out of 100 hate it.
We have them for physics and some other bullshit at Michigan Tech. Ours cost 20 bucks i think but we got a mail in rebate for the cost of them, so it was alright. They also call them the "PRS Unit" i guess it means personal repsponse system. either way they are complete and utter bullshit. since when do i care what 59% of the class thought was the correct answer when only my choice affects my grade?
They have been doing this for years. It's the most common form of assessment out there in elementary schools and high schools. They somehow even manage to assess writing skills this way.
This is fine as long as you use it in moderation. It is a lot cheaper to grade multiple-choice tests than handwritten tests. It is, however, far from the most effective way to find out what students know.
The point I am trying to make is that this sort of thing (multiple choice response) is one of the quickest and easiest ways to assess student learning, but it is far from the most effective. So this sort of technology could be extremely useful if used correctly, and not as a substitute for more effective ways of finding out who's learning what. It could greatly supplement effective teaching and assessment practices.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Or maybe you should have studied and answered the questions by knowing them. It probably would have saved you a ton of time, tool. Beating the system to make a point is smart, but beating the system just for its own sake is stupid.
I think I hear where you're coming from; a point of view un-defended is probably not worth defending. However, there is another factor I think you should consider: Time is a finite/scarce resource. Often, the timid do not share their views because they are afraid of ridicule, but more because they lack the skill to shoe-horn their words into an already crowded debate that must conclude on a certain schedule.
Granted, in the real world, it's necessary to have that skill of speech where you can assert yourself in a group, and be heard. However, what if there were a communication device that allowed groups to examine more points of view in less time than it takes to express them verbally? Would this not aid the group in examining the issue and arriving at the correct (most correct) conclusion?
The Clicker may not be the perfect answer, but it is a step toward a scenario where groups can vet all positions of its members without having to be so tedious as to wait for each member to have their time on the floor; they each can instead text a reply to a common bank where the remaining members can read the responses (ala IRC).
Specifically, group members can flag their responses to reflect agreement with or opposition to a given position, so that members can see at a glance where the consensus is, and who are the holdouts.
It might even encourage normally timid memebers to vocalize their dissent, because they can be confident of having their entire argument aired, rather than risk being cut-off.
But, any system that forces anonymity (except for specific instances) would be useless. I agree that if you are going to dissent, have the balls to stand up for what you believe.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams