Whither Computer Response Systems?

Interspersed with stories of student engagement and empowerment as a result of programs like No Child Left Behind, are the horror stories: rooms of laptops collecting dust, technophobic educators inhibiting student exploration, or outright rejection of outside ideals imposed without consideration for local approaches. These anecdotes illustrate the need of a coordinated approach of enhanced teacher training, revised pedagogy, and the fostering of generative classroom cultures in conjunction with the introduction of new technologies into learning spaces.

Starting in the Winter of 2002, I experienced this truth first-hand. Someone in the Computer Science department at UCSD had secured a grant to pilot the study of hand-held Computer Response Systems in and outside college classrooms. As a result, each student in entry-level CS classes that quarter, including me, were bestowed an HP Journada, the latest in PDA technology, replete with an embedded version of Windows, a color display, and a wireless card (all fairly cool, at the time). The idea, as it was explained to us, was for students to use their Journada's to respond to in-class, teacher-initiated polls designed to gauge aggregate understanding. We could also utilize them outside of classes as we saw fit (later, we learned that they had were in the process of developing a campus-wide geo-tagging system to augment the student experience).

As students, we were initially excited by the acquisition of a free, new technology, and we all devoted hours to setting up our network cards and configuring applications for personal use. Later, we experienced the downside of attempted classroom integration sans a coordinated approach. For the first two quarters of the program, my instructors attempted valiantly to incorporate the Journada into their existing teaching frameworks. Unfortunately, the use of polls did little more than disrupt the flow of lectures that had been perfected over years of practice. It seemed that any time devoted to a cursory review of poll results had to be reclaimed via rushed coverage of subsequent topics. After an intervening Summer, the use of Journadas in CS courses had been abandoned by teachers with content-oriented objectives. Not long after, the Journadas joined the dustbin of rapidly aged technologies made irrelevant by new advances.

This personal narrative has not been presented to attack networked learning technologies in general, or even Computer Response Systems in particular. Rather, to reinforce the call made by Fies & Marshall, Zucker & Light, and Stroup et al. to develop coordinated, systematic changes to classroom instruction to leverage the power of these new technologies. We have all witnessed the explosion of expressive content that can be generated using networking platforms like facebook and twitter. In many ways, this success has resulted from the effective employment of the generative features of agency described by Stroup et al: authorability and opportunities for content expansion (the Journada experience demonstrates that anonymity is not a sufficient condition).

If Computer Response Systems are to succeed in the classroom, then we need only look to the world of successful social networking for inspiration. The frightening truth for traditional-hegemonic educators (and I can count myself as having been one) is that students learn best when they are able to autonomously engage in real-time, public displays of jointly constructed representations using expressive artifacts of personal import. Of course, technology is important to this process, but insufficient to bring it to fruition in isolation. Education would be better served by initially developing cultures of student authorship and expressiveness, after which technology can be appropriately integrated.

References

Fies, C., & Marshall, J. (2006). Classroom response systems: a review of the literature. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 15(1), 101-109.

Stroup, W.M., Ares, N.M., & Hurford, A.C. (2005). A dialectic analysis of generativity: issues of network-supported design in mathematics and science. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 7(3), 181-206.

Zucker, A., & Light, D. (2009). Laptop programs for students. Science, vol 323, 82-85.