These routers have changed the way i look at things the technology has moved so far….

I’ll also point out that many instructors who teach with clickers find themselves “covering” just as much content (that is, achieving as much breadth), just doing so in a different way, a way that provides depth as well.

Other instructors who use clickers are just find sacrificing a little breadth for a lot of depth. As Assaf points out, there’s an optimization problem here. I think it’s important to assess just how “deep” your students are going when you increase the “breadth” of a course. Often, it’s not very deep at all.

Finally, I’ve got to step up and defend PowerPoint! Well, at least a little. Check out Garr Reynolds’ ideas in his book, Presentation Zen, and his blog of the same name:

http://www.presentationzen.com/

If you think of a PowerPoint slideshow as complementing one’s verbal presentation–and not the other way around–then PowerPoint can be a very effective way to enhance one’s presentation.

For instance, when I give a presentation on how people learn, I show this image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pipeapple/3071402405/

I use it to make the point that just as we don’t really know what’s inside of a laptop without x-raying it, we also don’t really know how our students are making sense of what we’re teaching them unless we try to “uncover” what and how they’re learning (usually through formative assessment).

The striking visual image helps make my point more memorable. At least, I think it does!

I’m a big advocate of clickers as a low-barrier way to change up the classroom structure — when used well!

Writing down something makes you think about it as you write it down (and gives me the time to do so). That’s at least how it works for me (as a student). Suppose you’re shown a picture with 5 marbles with different colors, and after looking at it for a minute you’re asked what colors were the marbles; contrast that with being told to copy down the picture during that minute with your crayons. I’ll bet that on average copying down the picture improves your performance tremendously. That’s why even a “slowed down” presentation won’t be as good as a blackboard. Maybe copying down something is just “passive thinking”, but it still beats “passive viewing” by a long shot. It also immediately highlights those parts of a derivation or an idea that you’re not sure about and helps you “understand what you don’t understand”.

I’m not saying that your other reasons for favoring a blackboard over a powerpoint presentation aren’t valid – they are, but I think they are secondary. Think about questions asked during class; 80% of the time people ask things that are either redundant (“is that a B or an 8 over there?”) or that you don’t care about because you either already know it, guessed it, understood it, or just don’t care about it. Plus, you always get questions from ‘know-it-alls’ that are more interested in demonstrating their cleverness than actually learning. Still, it’s good to have them there, since they give me time as a student to finish copying everything .

As for the studies you’ve shown, they’re fascinating, but the parameter of interest we’re trying to optimize isn’t how much a student can be taught, but how much he can be taught *per unit time*. A student can learn much better if he’s allowed to experiment prior to class, but that takes double the amount of time, doesn’t it? It’s already a full time job being a student (I remember my hectic BSc) – I couldn’t possibly imagine it being more intense!

For example, it would seem to (inexperienced) me that using clickers and starting a discussion about the results takes a lot of time (probably ~ 10 minutes in a large, 80 student classroom) – doing it routinely would mean having less time to teach the remaining material. Can you fit these new approaches into the existing time frames?

But a blackboard does engage the student, who copies the material off it actively.

I must strongly disagree! Acting as a scribe does NOT necessarily engage the student’s brain. I think we often make the mistake of comparing our students to ourselves. As experts in our field, if we go to a professional talk, our minds are very engaged in what we’re hearing, even though we’re sitting passively. We’re comparing what we hear to what we already know, making connections, formulating questions, and so on. It is a “minds-on” activity for us, as experts, to listen to somebody lecture (and perhaps to transcribe some of our thinking into a notebook). Students are not experts. We are guiding them through the material for the first time. There is a famous quote that education is the “passing of material from the lecture notes of the instructor to the notebooks of the students without passing through the minds of either.”

I’m not saying that lecture is necessarily completely ineffective — it can be an efficient way of summarizing material or going further *after* the student has been given a chance to wrestle with it and make sense of it for him or herself. Dozens of studies support this statement.

If that wasn’t so blackboards were as bad as powerpoint presentations, and they’re definitely not.

I believe that the major detriment of powerpoint in a lecture, as outlined in the post, is that it creates a “forced march” through the material, with no room for tangents or discussions. A blackboard is much more flexible — one can respond to those student questions, take the lecture in a different direction, the lecturer is forced to slow down to the pace of their own writing (which gives students more of a chance to absorb the material).

So, I believe that blackboards are better than powerpoint, but interactive engagement is better than either one on its own.

Do you have a link to one of your earlier posts that offers an alternative to it?

There are 45 posts under “How People Learn” — it’s one of the main foci of this blog. But here are a few of the ones that I like best:

http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2008/10/10/a-time-for-telling/

http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2009/02/12/what-do-you-believe-about-how-people-learn/

http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2009/02/11/classroom-clickers-and-the-cost-of-technology/

http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2008/11/17/why-students-fail-to-transfer-what-they-learn/ (If you like that stuff, search for “Schwartz” and I”ve written about his work a lot).

Thanks for the discussion, Assaf.

There has to be a balance between the depth at which a certain subject is learned (which is directly related to how active a student is) and the amount of material taught (the rate of teaching is highest when teaching is passive). It’s a depth vs breadth problem. I think a blackboard strikes a good balance between the two.

Do you have a link to one of your earlier posts that offers an alternative to it?

What’s wrong with the blackboard and a good lecturer?

I must take issue with that statement! There is plenty of research that shows the limitations of a “good lecture”, since learner’s brains aren’t engaged by passively sitting in the audience and listening. Much more substantial learning takes place when students are interactively engaged. Check out any of my posts under the category “how people learn” to see more of this research and my take on it. Lecture has its place, and it’s not bad per se, but it’s insufficient. If these digital technologies can help learners wrestle with complex topics and make connections in ways that traditional lecture can’t — then that’s a good thing. But they’re tools, like anything else. They can be wielded well, and wielded poorly.

A teacher should first and foremost develop his/her presentation skills, and should leave the electronic toys (that’s what they are) out of the picture; spoken as both a student and a lecturer.