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Even when the same faculty member teaches two sections
of the same course, and has taught them for years, what
students do and learn will differ. Add clickers,
or any other technology that increases options for
faculty and students, and that variation will probably
increase. So not only is education more unpredictable
than the weather: technology use can increase that
unpredictability by empowering faculty, students and
administrators to do their own thing, enabling the
institution and its people to interact more intensively with
the outside world. The old Ivory Tower was comparatively
simple and comparatively predictable in its isolation, but
today is a different, larger, and more interdependent world.
That makes it more important, and more
challenging, to do studies that help people understand their
programs and how those programs might be guided. Focusing on
activities (long term phenomena) rather than on technologies
per se (more transient) will help. Taking a look at all the
major factors influencing the technology should help, too.
The empowering role of technology is just one reason we emphasize unique uses perspective for
evaluation, and not just uniform impact approaches.
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Uniform impact perspective: our
evaluation focuses on goals and activities that are the
same (in kind) for everyone. For example, all students
do the same math homework in order to understand and
learn how to apply the central limit theorem in
calculus.
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Unique uses perspective: our
evaluation focuses on the learning in some broad zone of
relevance that is most importatn for each person
involved. At the start we assume that each
learner, and each faculty member, has somewhat different
goals and different capabilities, experiences different
events (some accidental), is creative in different ways,
and (for these and other reasons) experiences
qualitatively different outcomes.
This section of the
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook describes our
suggestions for how to create studies that balance the
uniform impact and unique uses perspectives.
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