Clickers as social computing tools?

I received the announcement below about clickers in the classroom, and it got me thinking: can clickers be used as social computing tools? Typically they're used as a way to record responses from students, which are then reported back to the professor and/or students after an answering period has ended. How could clickers be used in a mode where class trends positively influence students' learning in real time (as opposed to ex post facto)?

---------------------------

Come join us for the second session of the new "Best Practices with Teaching & Technology" Series this week. Registration is not required.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) and the Instructional Development Center (IDC), the series will host a 2 to 3-member faculty panel each month. Faculty will present and discuss how they use a particular technology to facilitate learning in the classroom.

Please join us for the second session on "Clicker Technologies" Tuesday, March 3rd, 11am-12pm in KRAN G004. The faculty members who will present and lead the discussion will be Barny Dunning, Associate Professor in Forestry and Natural Resources, and Tom Walter, Continuing Lecturer in Biological Sciences . They will be discussing innovative ways they've used clicker technologies in class to improve student learning.

Questions about this session may be directed to: Hans Aagard ( haagard@purdue.edu )

Please feel free to share this information with others. Thank you!

Questions for 2/23/09

1. In Scholars who Blog, Glenn (2003) suggests that there are no significant financial returns on blogging when compared with other kinds of online information distribution. Does this in turn result in more pure/real content free of influence by financial backers?

2. How could blogging and crowdsourcing intersect in an interesting and useful way?

JuicyCampus goes offline

This article discusses how the popular gossip website, JuicyCampus.com, has gone offline due to financial troubles. This website allowed people to post gossip about people they knew in an entirely anonymous manner, which "seemed to bring out the worst in people."

What implications does anonymity have for online collaborative learning systems? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Questions for 2/9/09

Here are my questions on the reading for 2/9/09:

1) Soller et al. described a number of educational collaborative learning systems that provide varying levels of monitoring and support of individuals who use them. Is it tractable to create such a system for an entire semester class, rather than just a single lesson?

2) How do the tenants of cooperative learning work when you have students who intentionally go against the norms and peer pressure in order to "be different"?

Week 4 questions

1. In Learning in School and Out, Resnick suggests that "school should focus its efforts on preparing people to be good adaptive learners, so that they can perform effectively when situations are unpredictable and task demands change." Based on Salomon's paper, social learning is inherently adaptive. Therefore, how can social computing systems leverage these ideas to create better adaptive learners?

2. In the ecological psychology paper, Young discusses how engaging new teachers in goal-changing training is a more effective way to promote technology adoption. How could technology adoption be driven from the side of students and parents?