“Clickers,” devices that allow real-time polling of students in a class, are seeing increased emphasis in higher education. In fact, they’re getting enough attention that whole books are being written about them. As the technologies involved in clickers mature, these devices are allowing teachers to keep more closely in touch with student progress—and monitor their own performance—in richer, more useful, and more immediate ways. A recent study at the University of Delaware, for example, found the devices not only useful in the science and math courses where they were predominantly deployed, but also in student polling about campus issues and in faculty meetings.
The problem is that most clickers require proprietary equipment and an often baroque set of infrastructure changes. And the devices themselves are highly limited, often consisting only of a number pad or perhaps a rudimentary “yes/no, true/false, A-B-C-D-E keyboard.” That means that clickers as they’ve now been developed are great… in a limited set of courses and circumstances. Algebra? Handy. Ethics? Probably less so. Student elections? Nice. Student discussion groups? Not so much. Testing students’ ability to recognize pre-organized material? Aboslutely. Synthesizing broad student responses to a collection of essays? Fuhgeddaboudit. As it currently stands (though some have used the technology in a lot more creative ways), the clicker is an evolution of the multiple-choice quiz, but it doesn’t stand a chance of replacing the essay quiz or the short-answer quiz.
We foresee much more flexibility in a device like the iPhone than could possibly come out of current clickers. With its free-form screen, full web access, and on-screen keyboard, the iPhone could not only mirror the functions of current clickers, but could allow the kind of free-form responses that would make clickers useful in a lot more classroom—and outside-of-the-classroom—situations. The more open-ended responses that can be generated on the iPhone could, in turn, be organized in a real-time “tag cloud” that would help teachers and students really see what their peers are thinking, without having to limit the possibilities on the front end. And since it’s also the students’ phone, they’re a lot less likely to forget it at home or let it run out of battery power.
While Apple’s still holding its iPhone application development kit under lock and key (at least for now), the iPhone’s Web 2.0 capabilities mean that even today, the sky’s the limit…
Just in case you were waiting for empirical evidence to buy into the prophetic hype surrounding the coming campus iPhone boom, SurveyU recently unveiled research findings that suggest a dramatic increase in demand for the device among college students. The firm, which has been tracking student interest in the iPhone since May, asserts that the $200 price drop has increased demand from 80% in June, July and August to 90% in September. The number of students planning to purchase an iPhone within the next few months doubled from 2% to 8%, and those who expressed “immediate intent” to buy increased from 0 to 0.5%.
