Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Now you lost me

krista.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–18 of 18 posts

Re: Now you lost me

#11

Post by jarofgreen »

> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so on!

Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting.

With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was anonymous so students didn't feel like they were being tested.)

Apparently it really helped lecturers, but there was more than once when the lecturer came to a complete stop because they didn't know where to go. (Better than carrying on blindly not knowing no-ones with you tho.)

These days, with cheap smart-phones and wifi on campus it would be easy to do something similar with just a website.

Re: Now you lost me

#12

Post by vhf »

jarofgreen wrote: post #11

> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so on! Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting. With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was…

I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

Re: Now you lost me

#13

Post by gromy »

vhf wrote: post #12
jarofgreen wrote: post #11

> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so on! Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting. With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was…

I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

We used a device called an "iclicker" at my school that could do all of this, though it was pretty much only used for paperless pop quizzes.

One benefit was immediately after, the teacher could display a bar chart showing the correct multiple choice answer and how many students voted for each of A,B,C,D thereby giving students and idea of where they ranked in the class.

http://www.iclicker.com/

Re: Now you lost me

#14

Post by pbiggar »

I love it! We have a similar thing in my company. We run a hosted CI service (https://circleci.com), and occasionally tests on Circle, but don't locally for the customer. That would just cause the customer to stop using us (and therefore not sign up at the end of the trial).

So we added a "report this build" button, and some text: "Uh-oh, this failed. If you didn't expect it to, report this build and we'll look into it". Since we added it about 3 months ago, this has led to dozens of bug fixes on our end, tons of improvements to the docs and language in the app, and lots of conversations with customers which helped us refine the product.

We should definitely add the same thing to our docs, like Stripe does. See the footer at https://stripe.com/docs/api

Re: Now you lost me

#15

Post by csense »

It might be better to implement with a small (fits inline with text) '?' icon next to each paragraph; clicking on it will show (or hide) a text field where you can type your question.

Bonus points if you use cookies or server-side state to make the user's question persistent (he's able to see what he typed if he reloads the page) and have a way to see a list of all the latest comments across your website on one page.

Re: Now you lost me

#16

Post by jarofgreen »

vhf wrote: post #12
jarofgreen wrote: post #11

> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so on! Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting. With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was…

I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

It was a decade ago and I can't remember any names, so probably not. Pretty sure it was the University of Stirling (UK) if that helps. Sorry.

Re: Now you lost me

#17

Post by jarofgreen »

gromy wrote: post #13
vhf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

We used a device called an "iclicker" at my school that could do all of this, though it was pretty much only used for paperless pop quizzes. One benefit was immediately after, the teacher could display a bar chart showing the correct multiple choice answer and how many students voted for each of A,B,C,D thereby giving students and idea of where they ranked in the class. http://www.iclicker.com/

How is that a benefit? Won't that just promote feelings of smugness or worry? Surely a students independent learning is what's important, not where they rank in an arbitrary group of others? Did they really emphasise this aspect of it?

Re: Now you lost me

#18

Post by roryokane »

vhf wrote: post #8
Swizec wrote: post #5

This is a really awesome idea, but it's missing an option to give a comment with my confusion. It would be much clearer for the author if I could specify what exactly confuses me.

Your comment confuses me. Were you trying to say Krista lost you before the first PS ?

No, I think Swizec was saying that he wanted the ability to write text after clicking "Now you lost me!", to explain just why he is lost. For instance, he might click the button and then write "I don't know who you meant by 'they' in the second sentence." into a text field that popped up before clicking "Send Feedback". Giving more specific feedback might help Krista fix the exact part of the post that is broken more easily.
Post reply on HN