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)

Serious games

I watched my 14 year-old son this morning as he created avatars on our Nintendo Wii, but got a little concerned when he created a Hitler Mii and a Stalin Mii. Still, it was impressive, because from memory he also created a Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln, all with very recognisable features, which leads me to believe that he must have paid a lot more attention during his History lessons than I ever did. He set them all running in a dubious U.S. 'presidential race', and I'm not sure who eventually won, but you can probably guess. The Barack Obama Mii picture here gives you some idea about how accurate these avatars can be, although I'm not sure POTUS would be too wild about the 'B.O.' label...

This led me to some thinking about games based learning, and how we can conjecture by simulating events that will never happen. My son was having great fun, but there was a serious underpinning to the games he was playing with images of world leaders. Watching him was a relevant little distraction, because I'm currently ploughing through a number of new books that have landed on my desk from IGI Global under the banner of their Information Science Reference series. The one I'm concentrating on at the moment is GBL focused and has the grand title: Games-Based Learning Advancements for Multi-Sensory Human Computer Interfaces: (Techniques and Effective Practices). It's a 372 page volume edited by Thomas Connolly, Mark Stansfield and Liz Boyle (all at the University of the West of Scotland). Despite it's very expensive tag ($195.00, or about £120) this hardback book has some readable chapters, and it tackles some relevant and emerging issues in this fast-moving field of learning technology.

The book seeks to: 'disseminate knowledge on the theory and practice of games-based learning, promoting the development and adoption of best practices'. And there are some best practices shared in the book, with stand out chapters by Nicola Whitton (Manchester Metropolitan University) who covers the use of computer games in HE, Dan Livingstone and his colleagues who discuss MUVEs and the use of Sloodle, and Colin Price (University of Worcester) who talks about the path between pedagogy and technology. He examines the metaphor of space and notions of embodiment in the context of discourse and collaborative learning. Good to see that there is also an entire section dedicated to disabilities and gender issues in games-based learning.

But there are two chapters that made the book worth reading, for me at least. The first is by Matt Sweeny and Helen Routlege - Drawing Circles in the Sand - in which they share how to integrate content into serious games. They hold that synergistic alignment of game and content is a gradual process that must be built into the game design. Too much initial instruction they argue, 'sucks the fun out of the game', but too much fun 'can make the learning harder to contextualise'. The second chapter, by the editors Connolly and Stansfield, showcases a model for Games-Based evaluation. Their model seems overtly psychological, involving the complex interplay between a number of components, including the perceptions of learners and instructors, their attitudes, motivations, and performamces. Although it appears to be hard to operationalise and there is a long way to go, this framework may point the way for games designers and tutors in the future.

My only criticism of this book (apart from the now traditional whinge that the high cost of IGI Global books puts them out of the reach of most educators), is that I could find nothing about digitial identity and the importance it plays in making games-based learning successful. Still worth a read though, if you can get your hands on a copy.

Image source