Learning, Motivation & Fun Story
Introduction
What makes things interesting and motivating in a class or other learning environment? When you learn something on your own, what conditions lead to your throwing yourself into it without external rewards? While there are theories to address these questions that we'll cover later in the semester, it's always useful to begin with direct experience. For that reason, we're going to ask ourselves and one other acquaintance to describe a past experience. Once we've gathered all that data, we'll comb through it, looking for patterns that turn up that might usefully predict effective learning that's fun. With those findings in mind, we'll be off to a good start in the course.
Requirements
In this assignment, you will record on video a description of a situation in which you learned something and had fun at the same time. In addition, you'll find an additional person who is significantly different from you in terms of age or background, and capture their responses to the following prompt:
Think of an experience in which you were learning something and were completely engaged in it and having fun. It can be something you learned on your own or it could be something that happened in a formal class or workshop. It need not involve technology of any kind. Focus on a specific topic or incident over a limited span of time.
Answer these questions:
- Who are you and where do you live? (First name only, like in AA.)
- How old were you when this experience occurred?
- What was the topic you were learning?
- Context: Where did this fun experience take place? Was it in a formal class or training event? An informal field trip or museum visit? An online course or educational software program? Some self-directed learning? How many people were with you?
- Please describe the fun learning event with as many details as you can.
- Why do you think this experience was fun for you? Specifically, what was it about the instructor, the place or you that made it fun? Again, the more details and thoughtful analysis, the better.
Jot down an outline of your answers on a piece of paper and practice telling the story out loud once or twice. Then park yourself in front of the webcam on your laptop or a video camera that you can get a digital video file from and describe the experience, being sure to hit all of the points from your notes.
Then repeat the process by interviewing someone else.
NOTE: The camera has a way of making you seem less vivacious than you really are. To get the real you across, you need to vamp it up a bit. Use your face muscles, push your voice out there and vary its tone. In other words: ACT.
Submit your videos to YouTube and write down the link to the video. Use "LMF" and "EDTEC670" as two of the tags to describe it. Then go to the entry form and complete the form to make it accessible to the rest of us. As part of the submission process, you'll be asked to characterize the experience described by your interviewee along several dimensions. These will include aspects of the social and physical environment, descriptions of the teacher and content, and an estimate of how both attention and control were distributed during the event.
Once all the videos have been submitted, you'll search through them and code selected stories and look for patterns and regularities in the stories. The best way to do that is to explore by using the built-in search interface to explore questions that seem interesting to you. For example:
- What kinds of experiences involved the heavy use of fantasy? What do they have in common and are there several kinds of fantasy represented?
- Is there a difference in the number of reports by men vs. women in terms of the importance of cooperation in the experiences they described?
- What kinds of engaging learning experiences do people describe in which there were no other learners, or no teacher? Can you make up categories to describe subsets of those experiences?
- How is engagement different for children compared to those in their 50s?
Once you've examined enough interviews (at least 20) to discover some reliable patterns, organize them them into at least five generalizations for describing fun learning environments.
You'll write up your generalizations and post them to the class Google Site. Write up your report to follow this outline:
- Introduction: what variables did you look at? (newly added this year)
- Generalizations: what truths can you discern from these stories?
- Implications: what does this tell you about what to do in designing your own experiences?
Each generalization should be numbered and begin with a single sentence in bold which distills what you want to say, followed by a paragraph that elaborates on it and describes the evidence you found for that generalization. Sample sentences from the stories would make your report more compelling. For example:
3) High school students almost universally reported that physical activity was an element in the experiences they called "fun". Bill W, for example described learning beginning archery skills at boy scout camp. Sallie Forth recalled a social studies class in which "we recreated in chicken wire and paper mache the battlefield at Shiloh and spent several class periods reconstructing the events there." All together there were 24 experiences that took place during high school years and all but 1 included physical activity. In most cases (19 out of 24) these activities also required creative or critical thinking.
Here are some example writeups from last year's class:
Evaluation Criteria
Grading will be determined by the following:
- Two interviews were submitted (2 points)
- All required parts of the report were included (5 points)
- Clarity of writing (3 points)
- Thoughtfulness of the implications section (5 points)
Due Dates
September 6/9, 2010: Both videos have been submitted to the database.
September 27/30, 2010: Analysis has been submitted
This assignment counts for 15% of your final grade.