Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Response to Vasa, Dr. Dawson and Martin
Thank you all for your comments about the post on forced learning and imagination/creativity/motivation. I read in one of the papers for my class paper that some teachers see undergraduates as not having the maturity to be in more adult-learning-theory situations. I feel this is a little off base. What do you guys think? As long as the instructor makes the topic of the course something that interests the students and develops fun, thought-provoking interactive activities for the students to participate in, then I don't see this as being a problem. Do some faculty write off undergraduates just on the notion that they are not mature enough to interact in a learning environment? Is it too much of a challenge? Or do they just not have the time to make their course an interactive, learning-based one? Just thinking outloud... :)
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Response to Joe, re: forced learning and motivation
This is a reply to Joe's post on his blog about the media-methods debate...
As I said in class, I earned my Master's degree entirely online and found that some of my courses were worth taking online while I felt others should have been done in a f2f environment. One idea that I thought stuck out in your discussion above (despite the awesome thought of a throwdown between Jaws vs. Darth Vader) is your mentioning "forced learning." I feel as though this happens all the time in courses that are not designed in a constructivist manner, which during my BA degree was ALL of my classes. The assignments were developed narrowly, allowing for no imagination (something that Brooke mentioned in her blog). With no allowance for imagination, how is one to be motivated to work at all? You are essentially working to get a grade to get a degree. I don't see the fairness in that for the student; you are getting cheated out of something that you are paying SO MUCH for. And I know that some students like that sense of just being told what they need to write about and then they do it and get a grade. For example, one of my friends is teaching a class at UF and has her students doing things that are very constructivist, but they say they want her to pick a topic for them so that they don't have to pick one. What are they going to school for if it's not to work on projects where they get to pick what they want to do and think on their own two feet? Is it just me?
As I said in class, I earned my Master's degree entirely online and found that some of my courses were worth taking online while I felt others should have been done in a f2f environment. One idea that I thought stuck out in your discussion above (despite the awesome thought of a throwdown between Jaws vs. Darth Vader) is your mentioning "forced learning." I feel as though this happens all the time in courses that are not designed in a constructivist manner, which during my BA degree was ALL of my classes. The assignments were developed narrowly, allowing for no imagination (something that Brooke mentioned in her blog). With no allowance for imagination, how is one to be motivated to work at all? You are essentially working to get a grade to get a degree. I don't see the fairness in that for the student; you are getting cheated out of something that you are paying SO MUCH for. And I know that some students like that sense of just being told what they need to write about and then they do it and get a grade. For example, one of my friends is teaching a class at UF and has her students doing things that are very constructivist, but they say they want her to pick a topic for them so that they don't have to pick one. What are they going to school for if it's not to work on projects where they get to pick what they want to do and think on their own two feet? Is it just me?
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