New for back-to-school: 'Clickers'

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with the devices, handing them off to a classmate and skipping class, for example.

Technology suppliers say such behavior hasn't been a big concern so far. "With the number of pads that we have in the market, we rarely hear of negative issues associated with cheating," eInstruction's Ward said.

Worth the price?
Perhaps that's because students want to make the most of their investment. In many cases, college students foot the bill for the clickers to the tune of $6 to $60 per device, depending on their features and whether they come bundled with a textbook.

Some pupils, including Pardis Esmaeili, a student at San Francisco State, balk at these prices. "Personally, I felt kind of like it was a waste of money because it didn't work most of the time," she said. "I felt like I didn't even use it. I kind of gave up on it."

Esmaeili paid $30 for an infrared clicker that was required for Auleb's class. This fall, Auleb plans to switch from infrared to a radio frequency system, which should work better, Fisher, the teaching assistant, said. The new clickers will also have another feature--a light that flashes green or red to indicate whether the signal was received or not, he said.

Such improvements may be welcome. Yet new iterations of the technology could force students to buy more clickers than they bargained for. A lack of compatibility among clickers and receivers from different manufactures could further worsen the problem at schools using multiple, incompatible systems.

Universities are looking to thwart the compatibility issue by settling on one technology supplier and requiring all professors to use their equipment, according to DTC analysts. But such "standardization," in industry lingo, may go against the grain of professors, who tend to be very independent-minded, Ward said.

"Those institutions have a hard time dictating (to professors) what they do in the classrooms," he said. "The emphasis is on academic freedom."

In the not-too-distant future, compatibility concerns may be made irrelevant by a new generation of systems that replace clickers with more common devices many students already own, such as Internet-enabled cell phones and laptops with Wi-Fi capability.

Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, is already experimenting with such a system. Mazur has used numerous generations of student response systems since 1992 for his introduction to physics courses and has even written a book on the subject.

"I think we want to get away from specialized infrared devices and go to consumer devices," Mazur said. "Why require students to buy a remote control and ask them to carry it around when they have already a device that can communicate?"

[TV James]

Oh, boo hoo.

"But such 'standardization,' in industry lingo, may go against the grain of professors, who tend to be very independent-minded, Ward said."

People are trying to be way too independent these days without understanding (or caring?) about the ramifications. Standards exist for a reason. To save money, avoid confusion, etc.

And a department complains later when we bill them for IT support because they insisted on implementing something other than the standard and we have to go learn how to support it. (That is not to say that if someone wants to prove to us why the standard doesn't meet the needs of their division, that we won't allow them to switch and support them, but if it's just a matter of personal taste, then it's your own problem.)

If you're going to start establishing IT guidelines (doing their job for them) then maybe the IT guys should come teach your classes. (What? They're not qualified and don't have the education necessary? But you're fully trained in the world of IT because you don't get lost when you go to Best Buy?)

It just amazes me that the same people who will accept the available choices for health plans from their employer without complaining raise the biggest stink if their exact brand of technology or software isn't the standard at their company and think they know best.

[Byronic]

IT establishing 'standards'

In my experience, the users often tend to know more about the
technology than the IT staff. Usually the IT staff is busy
pushing their own favorite tech and is upset that they should
have to know more than one technology. The ironic thing is
that the rest of us have to know at least 2 or 3 ways of doing the
same thing, but you, whose job it is to support this, think you
know best and are upset that the rest of us don't agree with you.
So you decline 'support' (e.g. work against your client's wishes)
when it is in fact your job to SUPPORT technolgy and not
DICTATE it.

If you don't like supporting a variety of technologies (let's say
you only want to use MS tech because it's just easier for you and
you are in your 'comfort zone') then maybe you need to find
something else to do.

[jvyduna]

Cell Phone ARS

This exists today - people can use their cell phones to vote in PowerPoint using Poll Everywhere, and it's free for low volume voting. See http://www.polleverywhere.com