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Brad DeLong provides the following instruction to new students in his Econ 1 class:

Given the benefits to your grade you will definitely want to acquire an i>clicker. Everyone is expected to have one and bring it to every lecture (including the first one). You can find new or used clickers online (at, say, Amazon.com) or locally at the ASUC Bookstore or Ned’s. They can be used for other courses for the duration of your time at Cal, and they can also be sold back at the conclusion of the semester. Once you purchase a clicker, register it at http://www.iclicker.com/registration/ with your name and 8-digit student ID.

Huh? You need to have a clicker to take classes at Cal? Do students make clicking noises if they don’t understand what the lecturer is saying? Click instead of raising their hand to ask a question? Tap out morse code? Or what?

None of the above. According to iclicker.com, i>clicker is an audience response system that “allows students to instantly provide feedback and answer questions posed by their instructors.” It works like this:

  • Each student uses a “clicker,” a portable, handheld device that allows students to vote by “clicking” on the appropriate button for his/her choice.
  • Instructors present a question and enable polling. Each student responds by “clicking” the appropriate button for his or her choice.
  • The instructor can then display voting results in a graph, to the audience. The results are also available for later analysis, grading, and exporting to any gradebook software or course management system.

Amazing. I’d never heard of this before today, which makes me feel really old. What’s next? Classes taught by robots? Flying cars? Electricity too cheap to meter? The mind reels.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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