image by flickr user oskay / cc licensed
This past summer, I TA’d a pilot program in Jason Jones’ class where every student was loaned an iPod touch for the duration of the session. It was an admittedly bumpy process, though fun – several assignments were invented days – possibly hours – before they were assigned. [Ed. note: A full post on this--including the reason for the improv--is coming next week!] At the end of the class, I asked if I could present one of my own, a sort of soft review of the iPod as a platform. I asked the students what they wish they had on the device; what magical app could they dream up that would solve all of their problems with the class?
One group decided they were going to re-invent the Kindle. An e-book reader with specific texts for the class on the iPods. They assumed that, if the campus was full of iPods, then professors would be compelled to offer iPod-ready versions of their literature. They surmised that the ebook reader would make it easier to quote (click on a quote or selection, get a bibliography-ready reference) and would ease the strain on their backs, and perhaps their wallets.
Another group wanted a social reading experience. While reading a text, you could find media online – like music, movies, and images, and connect it to particular selections. This was likely influenced by Jason’s particular manner of pedagogy- while reading The Táin, he made sure to give a listen to the Decemberists album based off of the epic. They figured that by imprinting your own particular context into a piece of text, you could bring both your understanding of it into brighter focus, and provide new perspectives for other readers – not unlike literary analysis usually found in class, but now with moving pictures.
The third main group came out to the idea of collaborative reading. Imagine a live book on your ipod that was connected to the other iPods reading the same book. With a hard-press or some cool multitouch action, you could snap your friends screens to a quote. It would allow you to direct a group to a specific piece of text, and allow them to explore from there. They imagined syncing up ipods to a particular presentation – like a powerpoint on crack!
As they were talking, an idea formed between them. If you take all of their ideas and combine them you get something pretty awesome – an ebook application that allows for collaborative reading and analysis with the addition of personalized contextual media. Professors could direct students to particular quotes, even track individual progress through the reading. Students could pepper their texts with things that they are reminded of, media and links that enhance the book for other readers. Perhaps a web application to manage these various versions of the book? As a Professor, you get to let readers see new insights into the book (perhaps ‘unlocking them’ after the initial read-through, reinforcing close reading) and as a student, you get rewards and incentives for paying attention, as well as a very easy, manageable platform for traditional studies / paper writing. Your class becomes awesomely organized and suddenly alive with technology – all for a cost very likely under your traditional smart classroom, and using a piece of tech they students are likely familiar with.
There are legal issues present in that app, without a doubt, and the creation of such an app would require in depth knowledge of programming – It’s mostly a pipe dream, at this point. This mythical app – code named Enkidu, the interpreter of dreams from the Epic of Gilgamesh – is something that I have spent a good while working on conceptually, and I think both myself and Jason are confident enough to suggest that it might be one NEH grant away from actual reality. I’d personally love to built it, and I want to know if you’d like to have it. What would you like from an app like Enkidu? What key features in classroom management would make the lives of ProfHackers everywhere easier, and make students more involved in tomorrows technology, yesterday’s text, and today’s class?
I look forward to hearing about it!
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21 Responses to Notes toward an iPhone app: Reading Texts with Enkidu
Leslie M-B - August 20, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I would love to try something like this in my classes, assuming that it’s accessible to students with disabilities. That seems to be a sticky wicket on many of these kinds of apps. Part of the app might be accessible, then other parts end up not being so.
George - August 20, 2009 at 4:09 pm
TANGENT/
assuming that it’s accessible to students with disabilities
Funny you should mention that, Leslie. I’m beginning work on a project that’s looking into the ways the digital humanities might start addressing the needs of disabled users…
As far as I can tell, no one’s really working, yet, in this area.
/TANGENT
Julie Meloni - August 20, 2009 at 4:31 pm
My only suggestion at this stage is that any app should be a web-based app with platform-specific hooks, as opposed to a native iPhone app. Beautiful and lovely though they are, don’t lock me into an iPhone. I want to perform these same actions on my Pre, my [insert smartphone of choice], and also through a browser (which could also be on a phone). I could go on about sustainability, accessibility, scalability, and flexibility, but will spare you. :)
Flip the idea upside down and think about functionality, where those functions currently exist, how they can be hooked together to achieve specific goals, and I think you’ll realize that the answer probably lies in leveraging existing open applications in a new way and then building out for specific devices. At least that’s how I’d build it, because I want everyone to be able to access the core functionality to achieve the pedagogical goals — not just because haptics are teh awesome (which they are).
Alex Jarvis - August 20, 2009 at 8:00 pm
@Julie – great points all around.
Optimally, it would be browser-based with added functionality on a range of mobile devices. I am an android fan myself (and as Jason can tell you, vehemently opposed to the cult of Apple). The real question in keeping it advice-agnostic is that of wireless functionality. If I can get several wi-fi devices in the same room talking to one another, then I will be a very happy developer.
The architecture for this kind of ad-hoc connection involves Enkidu software on X, all sharing a network, with one of them acting as the hub for connection and server (which I have deemed “Shamhat Mode”, for an extra pun to those familiar with Gilgamesh). If I can get, say, A Professors Laptop to play Shamhat and several wireless devices to play together nice-like, then again, very happy.
Ultimately, that might be out of scope for anything fundable by an NEH grant, or developed by me. At the start, I am planning an iPhone application (which comes with all the fun wireless stuff) and a webapp that syncs with said application (so that students aren’t tied to the device for their reading, and can fluidly add notes and personalize their text as noted).
tl;dr: I agree with you, and your proposed model of development will resemble mine closely. For the purposes of the post, I described it the other way around, because the in-class discussions and functionality is what drove the idea to conception.
Derek - August 20, 2009 at 10:21 pm
For several months, I’ve been thinking about ways to use smart phones as “super-clickers” in class, leveraging what I know about teaching with clickers in the design of more general classroom response systems–systems like the one you’ve described here.
As I’ve been brainstorming, I’ve found it helpful to ponder this question: What if all the students in a class had smart phones and could engage in Web 2.0 activities on those phones during class? How might that be helpful to the learning process? Sure, I could have students tag photos on Flickr (for instance), but how might it be helpful to have them do so during class? I think a good answer to that question means you’ve got an app worth pursuing.
What about this scenario? You ask your students to find quotations from a text that support a particular claim. Your students pull out their smart phones, start scanning through the electronic copy of the text, and highlight appropriate quotes. Those quotes are then sent to your computer, where you read them quickly as they come in to get a sense of where your students are going with this task.
After all the students have had a chance to find a quote or two, you project the list of quotes submitted by the students on your computer projector and lead a class discussion about the quotes, examining how each quote does or does not support the claim in question.
For added value, you could turn on a word cloud effect in which quotes selected by multiple students are presented in larger fonts. After class, the quotes could be tagged in a “master” version of the electronic text with the claim in question to help students study.
That sounds pretty useful to me. What do you think?
Brian Croxall - August 20, 2009 at 10:44 pm
If you’re looking to get people sharing and commenting on the text, then you could be using something like Zotero and Zotero groups. I’m pretty certain it’s not presently possible for multiple people with different accounts to mark-up the same copy of the text, but it’s something worth suggesting.
Alternatively, something like Read It Later might be a useful tool to bring into the mix. It’s already browser-based and cross-platform. It just needs more social media added to it, the ability to supplement the texts, and a way to push pages/paragraphs to someone else. I’ll freely admit that that is a lot of new ground to cover.
Finally, a lot of what you’re wanting students to do can be done in a Google Doc (collaborative editing, insertion of some media) or a wiki without going through all the trouble of developing something new. (I know, I’m a spoil sport.)
Leslie M-B - August 20, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Yes, but what university has the $$$ to buy smart phones for students in large classes? UC Davis has as many as 900 students in some of its courses, and we don’t even have full cell or wireless coverage on campus. It was only in the last 6 months that I received cell coverage in my office in a classroom building–and the building is on the central campus quad!
The learning scenario you sketch here sounds great, but it’s for privileged students on a well-heeled campus, not for schools with large numbers of first-generation, working-class college students or with a majority of students who may be from the middle class but from lesser socioeconomic backgrounds than, say, the kids at Stanford. Our students complain about having to pay $40 for a clicker; I can’t imagine telling them they need smart phones and smart phone data plans. (Looking around campus, it seems most of the students don’t have smart phones now, though I haven’t seen any surveys.)
Alex Jarvis - August 20, 2009 at 11:30 pm
A great point, Leslie. As a student, I am largely ignorant to the way that campuses distribute their technology budget. However, though I mention iPhones, the actual platform it would be designed for would be the iPod touch – still not cheap, but as it was described to me, cheaper for the school to purchase for each student than, say, installing and maintaining smart classrooms. Ultimately, that is what this would help to do – decentralize the smart classroom from a “Projector-Computer” model to a more interactive model.
Also, as I am insanely ignorant; what is a ‘clicker’ in this scenario?
Alex Jarvis - August 20, 2009 at 11:31 pm
True, but the classroom organization/collaboration using the “Shamhat” wireless system is really what intrigues me about the possibilities of such a system. The sort of textual analysis afterwards is icing on the proverbial cake.
And you’re just sad that I beat you at munchkin.
Derek - August 20, 2009 at 11:31 pm
You make a good point, Leslie, about cost to students and infrastructure issues. However, I didn’t see Alex raising that in the post, so I didn’t think I needed to address it in my comment. I read the post more as a “What If?” scenario: What if our students all had smart phones? What kinds of apps would we want to have for the classroom in that hypothetical situation?
The infrastructure issues you mention (cell and wireless coverage) make more attractive tools like clickers that don’t depend on such infrastructure. As for the cost of clickers themselves, if a campus has standardized on a particular clicker and a given student uses his or her clicker in a few courses over time, the return on investment of that $40 is higher.
I’m not familiar with all the latest surveys of student technology ownership, but the 2008 ECAR survey of 27,000 students at 98 four- and two-year institutions indicated that more than 80% of students own laptops and 83% of students use text-messaging. That indicates to me that many students have some kind of communication technology that might be leveraged in the classroom, even if it’s just text-messaging (again, depending on cell coverage). With all the cheap netbooks on the market now, I would expect that even more students have some kind of Internet device now.
Derek - August 20, 2009 at 11:33 pm
@AlxJrvs: Clickers are instructional technologies that allow instructors to collect and analyze student responses to multiple-choice (and sometimes free-response) questions during class. Typically, an instructor poses a question to a group of students, students submit their answers to the question using wireless handheld devices (often called “clickers”) that beam radio frequency signals to a receiver connected to the instructor’s computer, software on the instructor’s computer displays a bar chart showing the distribution of responses, and the instructor uses these results to make “on the fly” teaching decisions that are responsive to student learning needs.
Alex Jarvis - August 20, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Thanks for that – I have yet to really encounter one.
Alex Jarvis - August 20, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Derek has the right of it; The situation described to me was, basically: “So, there is a conceivable future where the entire campus has a mobile internet device with them at all times, given to them by the university, standard. What can we create to manage that future?”
Leslie M-B - August 21, 2009 at 12:28 am
Alex, Here are the clickers we use at Davis. They don’t require a smart classroom, just an instructor with a laptop with a receiver plugged into the side of it: http://www.einstruction.com/products/assessment/prs/index.html
They have limited functions, but in classes where there previously was very little interaction (because faculty didn’t understand how to have an interactive course w/300-900 students), they allow faculty to gauge student understanding of concepts on the fly.
Leslie M-B - August 21, 2009 at 12:30 am
Funny story: One of our more innovative and engaging young humanities faculty wasn’t getting the kind of participation he wanted (and had seen in previous quarters) from his students in a 100-person course. He figured they were reluctant to speak up in front of their peers, so he had them bring their cell phones and message him via Twitter.
Want to guess how many students messaged him during the second half of the quarter during which he piloted this scheme?
One. Because he felt sorry for the prof.
Ends up the students weren’t being shy, just apathetic. :)
Alex Jarvis - August 21, 2009 at 12:32 am
Yeah… sadly, some of the results from the class display a similar ethic. Of course, being a student myself, I don’t understand apathy when it comes to technology… but then again, I am a huge geek. It’s a give and take. :)
Derek - August 21, 2009 at 12:34 am
I would be interested in hearing about some strategies for engaging giant classes (300+ students) without using clickers, Leslie. Maybe in a future ProfHacker post?
I’ve blogged a few ideas for using clickers in English courses. I also interviewed a couple of humanities professors for my book on teaching with clickers. There aren’t a lot of humanities folks using clickers, however, so I’m always up for hearing new ideas.
Leslie’s point here is a useful one: For someone teaching a large class with very little interaction, clickers provide a very sensible way to make a shift toward active learning and agile teaching.
Jason B. Jones - August 21, 2009 at 1:39 am
Believe me, our school is not well-heeled or privileged. We’re a regional comprehensive state school. The device Alex and I were using wasn’t a smartphone, it was an iPod Touch. (But it’s easier to say iPhone app, right?)
I’ll talk more about this in my upcoming post, but it might help to frame the question this way: What’s more pedagogically useful? Cramming presentation stations into every teaching room on campus, or giving students handheld, wireless-capable computers that let them transform the learning environment in new ways? There’s a chance the dollar cost would be comparable.
Leslie M-B - August 21, 2009 at 2:23 am
Jason, that’s a really good question about balancing pedagogy and cost. In all general assignment classrooms at UC Davis we have smart panels that have CD/DVD, ethernet, VGA hookup, microphone, assisted hearing devices, and I’m sure some other stuff I’m forgetting. The largest lecture halls are also set up w/simple podcast recording devices activated by faculty and that use CompactFlash cards the faculty insert themselves.
Many of our rooms also have–or can have added on request–WolfVision scanners that allow faculty to show in high magnification live insects, leaves, currency, handouts, or whatever else fits on the platform. These also can be set up to record video, for example, of a professor writing and solving an equation. They’re pretty cool but definitely underutilized and not really set up for collaboration.
Smartphones and other mobile devices bring another level of interactivity to the classroom, but when I observe classes from the back of the room, I’m already seeing most students with laptops playing games or using Facebook. I used to dismiss such distractions as productive play of some sort, but I’m no longer convinced. I worry, then, about what kind of motivations (or checks & balances) would keep mobile-using students focused almost exclusively on learning for the 1-2 hours of class.
Don’t get me wrong–I love my iPhone, and I see its potential. But through years of practice, I’m a much savvier learner and collaborator than many, if not most, of my students.
josh - August 26, 2009 at 12:49 pm
1-2 hour class
In one university orientation I was told the average attention span reaches 40 minutes. Add 5 minutes on either side for administrative matters and you reached our 50 minute lecture period. Add ten minutes to move to the next class. Now you’re at one hour blocks of time.
You still have to change something every 5-15 minutes to keep peak interest: mode of lecture; type of questions; insert interactive discussion, or even an extra “water” break to let things sink in subconsciously.
josh - August 26, 2009 at 12:52 pm
1-2 hour class
In one university orientation I was told the average attention span reaches 40 minutes. Add 5 minutes on either side for administrative matters and you reached our 50 minute lecture period. Add ten minutes to move to the next class. Now you’re at one hour blocks of time.
You still have to change something every 5-15 minutes to keep peak interest: mode of lecture; type of questions; insert interactive discussion, or even an extra “water” break to let things sink in subconsciously.