Can We Avoid Being Trapped by Clickers?

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Clarissa

July 13, 2016

At the clickers committee, people started ranting against the subscription model that the clicker company is trying to force us into.

“This sucks but it’s unavoidable. We can’t do anything,” people were saying. “This is what predatory capitalism is like. It aims to squeeze every penny out of you. There is nothing we can do.”

The whole thing is quite risible because there is absolutely something we can do to avoid being trapped into the clicker subscription model.

It’s called teaching.

We can finally let go of the pernicious notion that in order to be good teaching needs to be gimmicky. Teaching existed for millennia before clickers were invented, and I don’t think anybody can argue that an enormous breakthrough in teaching has happened since clickers came into existence. I never had them sued on me when I was a student, and I’m sure nobody here can say that I’m lacking in education.

We will now spend at least a year discussing alternatives to clickers, interviewing vendors, and wondering how to pay for in-class polling technologies. The possibility that we can simply not do in-class polling is not even being discussed because people make big scared eyes when one timidly suggests this option.

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27 responses to “Can We Avoid Being Trapped by Clickers?”

Alex

July 13, 2016

I think it’s clear that a teacher can make good use of clickers (I certainly try to, if I have a class of 50 or more students), but I hate the idea that using clickers is some sort of imperative. Too many professors are too susceptible to edufads. I’d love to blame it all on administrators, but (some) professors have to own their share of the blame.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 13, 2016
  
  Exactly. We don’t have to be beholden to the companies that make this stuff.
  
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  1. Alex
    
    July 13, 2016
    
    It’s really not about the companies. I’m more and more convinced of that. If it were about the companies then faculty would be going ga-ga over online homework (at least in math and science). OK, some do, but it’s not what gets the evangelical passions going, even though there’s more money to be made from online homework than from clickers. And there’s even research showing that frequent and immediate feedback is really valuable (duh), and online homework is great for that. But most faculty in the sciences don’t get evangelical about online homework.
    
    OTOH, clickers lead naturally into the lecture on not lecturing, and that hits tons of cultural resonances. I’m more and more convinced that edufads (at least in science) are about faculty culture and psychology more than the pecuniary interests of vendors. (Though the vendors certainly do what they can to cash in.)
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      July 13, 2016
      
      “I’m more and more convinced that edufads (at least in science) are about faculty culture and psychology more than the pecuniary interests of vendors.”
      
      I agree. It’s all about teaching as little as possible and masking it with flashy gimmicks. Prefab tests, prefab homework, screening idiotic “educational films” in class for hours and hours, etc. I hate this kind of stuff, especially when students are forced to pay for it.
      
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      1. Alex
        
        July 13, 2016
        
        No, not just about gimmicks. Some of the trendy stuff actually takes a lot of work to implement. Fundamentally, many faculty really believe in what they’re doing, because they want to see themselves as the sort of progressive-minded people who do all the right things and create a hyper-egalitarian environment and all the rest.
        
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      2. Alex
        
        July 13, 2016
        
        Every academic in the US should read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Progressive education is about way more than laziness; some people work damn hard at it. A lot of academics really need to feel like they’re being as progressive as possible. It’s something built into American culture.
        
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        David Gendron
        
        July 13, 2016
        
        Those fucktards believe because they have no idea what teaching really is.
        
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        David Gendron
        
        July 13, 2016
        
        Those fucktards believe in that kind of crap because they have no idea what teaching really is.
        
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        cliff arroyo
        
        July 14, 2016
        
        “It’s something built into American culture.”
        
        I think it’s uncritical faith in technology. Within American culture there’s no really effective way to argue against something presented as new and improved technology.
        
        This is also behind the expansion of prepared foods of low quality and probably smartphones as well.
        
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        Alex
        
        July 14, 2016
        
        Techno-utopianism is definitely part of it. The other part is that Americans are primed to hear a phrase like “sage on the stage” (a common pejorative used to promote progressive new educational methods in higher ed) and think of it as a bad thing. Who’s that smartypants standing up there acting like he knows stuff, huh? And liberals and conservatives both feel that way. The conservatives don’t want no intellectual types telling them what’s what, and liberals want students to mostly talk to each other rather than listen to the instructor because that’s more egalitarian.
        
        Read Hofstadter. This shit goes way back to at least the Great Awakening. Which is a shame, because the Puritans were pretty gung-ho on intellectualism. (Yeah, there were the witch trials, but it was just that one time. Otherwise they were big on learning.)
        
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        Clarissa
        
        July 14, 2016
        
        I heard about this book but I haven’t read it. Maybe I should.
        
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David Gendron

July 13, 2016

This is what I call “bling-bling teaching”.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 13, 2016
  “This is what I call “bling-bling teaching”.”
  
  Yes. It’s little content and a lot of flash.
  
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cliff arroyo

July 14, 2016

” The other part is that Americans are primed to hear a phrase like “sage on the stage” (a common pejorative used to promote progressive new educational methods in higher ed) and think of it as a bad thing.”

Well that comes from the frontier (which did more to shape American attitudes than anything else).

Part of surviving in a frontier situation is prioritizing practical over theoretical knowledge as well as being willing to try new things (in terms of say a lawyer learning how to raise pigs or a teacher trying their hand at carpentry). This is probably why the emphasis on well rounded generalist knowledge in most of American education – as opposed to European intense early specialization.

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1. Alex
  
  July 14, 2016
  
  The frontier is part of it. Another part of it is the Great Awakening, and the focus on individual testimony to religious experience rather than the perspective of learned clergy. And besides the frontier there’s also the general egalitarianism that de Tocqueville noted in early American culture*, which resists not only the idea of putting a scholar on a pedestal but also the idea of tracking kids into different paths early in life rather than giving them a chance to try whatever they want.
  
  There’s a lot to be said for letting people try whatever they want, but you have to accept the possibility that some will fail. Our ideas of educational accountability are ill-suited to a system where anyone can try anything (and will be encouraged to do s0).
  
  *Offer void where prohibited. Women, blacks, natives may not be eligible.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    July 14, 2016
    
    “Another part of it is the Great Awakening, and the focus on individual testimony to religious experience rather than the perspective of learned clergy.”
    
    I assume the frontier experience and the Great Awakening work(ed) in a feedback loop. A disregard for learned clergy is part of a larger disregard for “experts” far removed from practical experience and having to learn how to make your own house encourages the housemaker to make their own religion. It’s DIY in both contexts.
    
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cliff arroyo

July 14, 2016

As I think I mentioned before, I’d never heard of “clickers” until recently on this blog. While I can think of an occasional fun use of them, depending of them seems relentlessly stupid.

And I’ll also say that I don’t think they’d work at all in cultures where students are supposed to show solidarity with each other (rather than compete with each other).

Asking a Polish class “Okay, which is the third person singular subjunctive of ‘tener’ ?

a. tiene
b. tengo
c. tenga
d. tuvimos

would probably result in a lot of whispering and/or looking at each others’ clickers… (or half the class simply not clicking at all).

But the easiest way to defend against techno-trinkets in Poland is “Ain’t nobody got money for this shit!” (a bit more diplomatically phrased).

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 14, 2016
  
  I can see how clickers can be used in huge classrooms to break the tedium of a long lecture but to hear people speak about them., it’s as if somebody tried to prohibit books.
  
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Shakti

July 14, 2016

What, no discussion of Pokemon Go as an important pedagogical tool? Why are these edufaddy technocrats behind the times?

I wonder if this emphasis on technology is used to deflect criticism of the Baumol’s Cost Disease that people claim afflicts education.
“Costs are going up because of technology!” sounds better than “costs are going up because of labor”

Ugh.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 14, 2016
  
  I suddenly started hearing about this Pokémon GO from everywhere yesterday. It’s like it is suddenly all over the place.
  
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TomW

July 14, 2016

I get the impression that your campus suffers from a lot of one-size-fits-all thinking. Clickers are very popular and encouraged on my campus, but only for very large classes. The students seem to think it’s ok to skip lectures for big courses because no one notices and they also tend to space off a lot in big courses because the professor doesn’t notice that they aren’t paying attention when there are 400 other people in the room. Clickers are a way to combat those problems in big classes by giving little quizzes as part of the lecture, your grade suffers if you aren’t there or don’t pay attention. No one uses clickers in small classes and I’ve never heard anyone suggest that they are useful outside of a large class environment.

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Alex

July 14, 2016

On some campuses, clickers inspire a zeal that could be best described as “Campus Crusade for Clickers” (to riff off of “Campus Crusade for Christ”).

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 14, 2016
  
  I should have known this before I got on this committee. My role on the committee is to represent people who never use clickers. And I already feel like an apostate who confessed she never took communion.
  
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  1. Alex
    
    July 14, 2016
    
    You don’t use clickers?!?!?!?!?!?!
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      July 14, 2016
      
      Yes, I’m the infidel. 🙂
      
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Contingent Cassandra

July 14, 2016

Everything that can be done with clickers can be done with a set of cards — colored on the front, plain white on the back. Students hold up the card corresponding to their choice, and the teacher can see individual students’ choices but the students can’t. The numbers aren’t quite as precise (and there’s no record unless the teacher takes a picture), but it should be enough to get a rough idea of the distribution of answers. And it’s very, very cheap compared to clickers, doesn’t require wifi or a phone, etc., etc., etc.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 14, 2016
  
  That’s a brilliant idea.
  
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