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On Monday 4th November, I headed up to Dublin to attend the Turning Technologies User Conference at Trinity College Dublin. Although we are not a customer of Turning Technologies, we do have some significant experience with the use of Personal Response Systems , or clickers, which I've blogged about before. We have a large number of clickers made by eInstruction, which was recently bought over by Turning Technologies , so I was interested to see where the technology is heading. Opening Keynote: Eric Mazur The conference also gave me the opportunity to hear Eric Mazur speak. I've been aware of Mazur's work with clickers and peer learning for some time; his YouTube video Confessions of a Converted Lecturer is a joy to watch. His polished performance yesterday was an excellent demonstration of the techniques he promotes. Although he was speaking to the converted (he didn't need to convince anybody of the need for more active forms of learning), Mazur kept us engaged and ...

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've been attending the iClicker Pedagogy Webinar series over the last few weeks, and find them very interesting. On 25th January, Roger Freedman ( @RogerFreedman ) spoke about Pedagogical Best Practices. On 15th February, Angel Hoekstra spoke about Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching with Clickers in the Social Sciences. This week, on 22nd February, Jennifer Kaplan spoke about her use of clickers in large Statistics classes. It's interesting to hear about the different approaches, and also to see the common themes. In my post last week, I gave an account of the student feedback on the use of clickers in the College of Science initiative at NUIG. On the whole it was very positive, and it encouraged the College to expand the use of clickers to include 1st and 2nd year undergraduates. But, what about the staff issues? Three group meetings were arranged during the academic year, when all staff involved in the clicker project were invited to c...