Peer Instruction in Large Classes (Talk about Teaching column), by Paul A. Heiney

Almanac of the University of Pennsylvania, v 56, n 22 (Feb 16, 2010)

News articles on the use of TurningPoint brand clickers

This is a short article from the New York Times about the student uprisings in Paris during May 1968 and their lasting effects on French culture and psychology. The title alone, “Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French” says a lot about the content, namely that the uprisings were not wholly supported by French society, and that there is a distinct split in between how they are remembered in French society; the Right calls them “the events”, while the Left calls it “the movement.” The article cedes that youth revolt was common throughout the West, but that France was unique in its potential to foment a political revolution, with 10 million striking workers. The article notes how the desire behind May ’68 was unfulfilled, as the right is now in power. It quickly summarizes a chronology of the events, namely that the student uprisings spread out from Nanterre University to the elite Sorbonne, and eventually to the workers of the nation. A former participant in the uprisings says, “the revolution was social not political,” and that while students spoke of revolution they never intended to carry it out. The article also lists the social transformations that French culture has undergone since 1968, and claims that the “anti-authoritarians of the time were fighting against a very different society,” in effect disabling the notion of any future social revolution.
    The article provides a useful historical context for the ramifications of the uprisings in 1968, as well as a critique of, essentially, the ambiguity of Vigo’s conclusion to “Zéro de Conduite.” If Paris in May 1968 was a realization of a theory of anarchist pedagogy, its final results were disappointing, because the nation now has a conservative government. The end of Jean Vigo’s film offers an apparent victory, but no steps further than that, something that many anarchists love to do, while not realizing the damage to the credibility of their movement. Perhaps it is for this reason that the protestors of Paris spoke often of revolution in romantic, lofty terms such as the surrealist rebellion presented in Vigo’s film, but in actuality, never attempted to complete that vision because the vision itself was incomplete, a simple specter of the meme that revolution had become in the collective consciousness of French society. Regardless, the article is valuable to my thesis because it challenges the apparent victory of subversive creativity over entrenched power structures, because power always adapts, whereas visions of the revolution have remained anachronistic.

full citation: Erlanger, Steven . "Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French - New York Times." The New York Times. 30 Apr. 2008. 30 Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30france.html?_r=2&oref=slogin>.

This article explicitly analyzes Vigo’s two feature films and If… in the context of anarchism. It is a very useful reference because it provides potentially all of the political analysis of the film in the context of older and contemporary anarchist theory. It discusses how Vigo’s film was ahead of its time in anarchist theory, specifically by likening school to a prison, which anticipated the works of Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, and Paul Goodman, among others. It also provides historical context, such that the French boarding schools of the era were often built like prisons.  The entire article essentially posits the film as an example of anarchist pedagogy.
    This source is crucial to my hypothesis, mostly for the dichotomy it delineates more fully between schools and prisons, and the fact that it deals almost explicitly with the relationships between the film and theoretical anarchist pedagogy. Evidently, this portrayal of a children’s rebellion in school is what many anarchists would see as testing ground for a new social order, where the creative spontaneity of children is equivalent to collective social desire, which is repressed by authority figures. The article sees the possibility of liberation with creativity in school as a model for the anarchist notion of collective liberation throughout society, ultimately hailing children as those with the potential to create a new social order. An interesting viewpoint from the article is that it mentions the director’s care to avoid fetishizing childhood innocence as in the Victorian era by making the children into spontaneous troublemakers. These troublemakers thus reject the less-radical notion of “children’s rights” that was trumpeted by a few almost-anarchist theorists of the time because they reject the law itself, firmly cementing this film’s reflection of the most radically individualist anarchist ideas of the era. Finally, the article discusses the open-ended conclusion of the film as the most potentially radical act of all. It leaves open the question of whether the alternative, after the children’s rebellion, is some alternative educational structure with a new form of hierarchy populated by kids, or whether the children scampering off into the distance represent deschooling, and a praise for the wild, creative instincts of children. Either way, the film’s inconclusiveness allows the spectator and characters in the film to decide for themselves, a decidedly anarchist move.

Web page that includes

What is a Classroom Response System (CRS)
Teaching with a CRS
Why use a CRS?
Challenges in using a CRS
Bibliography

Includes articles and best practices

This is an evolving bibliography of resources related to the pedagogy of classroom response systems ("clickers").

Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, 21(2), 167-181 (2002)

Maths CAA Series:  June 2005 

MSOR Connections  Vol 3 No 2 May 2003

American Journal of Physics, January 2006.  Vol. 74, Iss. 1, pp. 31-39. 

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning vol. 20, pp81–94 (2004)

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning vol. 20, pp95–102 (2004)

Journal of Science Education and Technology [1059-0145] yr:2006 vol:15 iss:1 pg:101

Teaching Mathematics and Its Applications, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2003

The Astronomy Education Review, Issue 1, Volume 5:70-88, 2007

Educause Quarterly 2007(2), p. 71

Kansas City Star, The (MO), Nov 24, 2005

Medical Reference Services Quarterly, Spring2007, Vol. 26 Issue 1, p81-88, 8p

Edited by David A. Banks

Journal of College Science Teaching; Nov/Oct2007, Vol. 37 Issue 2, p60-62, 3p

Podcasts and other presentations from a conference on the use of clickers at TurningTechnologies

News articles on the use of TurningPoint brand clickers

University of Toronto

Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects

From the website:

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments. 

Moodle and Second Life mashup

Maybe, says Jerry Sternin, the problem isn't with the outside experts or with the company. "The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn't work," says Sternin, 62. "It never has. You can't bring permanent solutions in from outside." Maybe the problem is with the whole model for how change can actually happen. Maybe the problem is that you can't import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but "deviant" practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization -- and change comes when you find it.

Course Management Systems for Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy is a comprehensive overview of standards, practices and possibilities of course management systems in higher education. Course Management Systems for Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy focuses on what the current knowledge is (in best practices, research, standards and implementations) and the history of the CMS, while also discussing innovative practices in CMS instructional design that have been informed by learning theory and intentional pedagogy. The last section of this book is an invited section, where vendors (WebCT, OKI, Angel) and innovators address their vision of the tools, practices and possibilities in a true next generation. Course Management Systems for Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy represents the points-of-view of a variety of stakeholders and allows each to write in the style and language that is relevant to their field, making this an incredibly useful tool for practitioners, developers, administrators, faculty members, and students.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

In this text, Herring brings together a variety of sociological and linguistic essays on computer-mediated communications.  In the first section, "Linguistics Perspectives", the authors seek to define the oral and written linguistics aspects of email, IRC chat, and computer conferencing while contrasting them with face-to-face interactions.  In the second section, "Social and Ethical Perspectives", the authors deal with social issues of interaction such as cooperation versus conflict and the role of radical feminism for internet discourse ("Cyberfeminism" by Kira Hall).  The third portion deals with "Cross Cultural Perspectives" in which CMC is analysed between North American, East Asian, and Mexican students and theories of classroom diversity are presented.  Finally, the last grouping "CMS and Group Interaction" explores how CMC can change people's lives - exploring the group dynamics of online forums (Korenman and Wyatt, "Group Dynamics in an Email Forum"), how e-mail has changed the work environment, and how groups conduct internet-based protests.