Hanging in there

Socrates once said: 'I cannot teach anyone anything, all I can do is make them think'. And then there was Andrew Carnegie who said: 'People who can't motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.' Some teachers struggle to motivate their students, and some students find it hard to concentrate for long enough to learn anything. So what is this slippery, elusive thing we call motivation? We certainly need it to do anything, anything at all. But where does motivation to learn come from and how can we capture it?

One of our Atlantis University team, Tillman Swinke, recently published a blog post called 'This time it's personal' where he deals with the subject of motivation in relation to informal learning. He remarks that learning always starts at the personal level (correct) and argues that therefore, informal forms of learning should assume more importance. Tillman then goes on to describe some of the most motivational ways to learn (e.g. my girlfriend only speaks Chinese, therefore I am motivated to learn to speak Chinese). He argues that informal learning has both intrinsic (self motivated) and extrinsic (externally imposed demands) motivation. I tend to agree but will maintain that informal learning is more reliant upon an individual's intrinsic motivation than it is by any external pressures. In other words, we learn because we are interested. When we move into the more formal aspects of learning, there the extrinsic motivation begins to be applied through a need to achieve good grades, complete successful projects and avoid falling behind your peers. The trick is to maintain an intrinsic motivation that is just as strong as if one were still learning informally.

This is one reason, I think, why personal learning environments (which tend to heavily represent informal learning approaches and are intrinsically motivated) are assuming an ever increasing importance in education. For it is within the PLE that students can truly pursue their own interests, motivate themselves to learn and generally capitalise on their personal talents and skills. It is the PLE that enables learners to transcend the often stifling nature of the institutional VLE to make their own creative choices about tool selection and formation of digital presence and identity. Now that's interesting....

Related posts

Intrinsic & extrinsic motivation and informal learning (DPhil Stuff)

What's in it for me? (Social eLearning)

There's no LMS in my PLE (Shelley Gibb @mollybob)