Intrinsic Motivation

Dan Pink's talk about motivation from TED.com is fantastic. I'm trying to work out what it means for teaching. The basic idea is that providing extrinsic rewards works only when there is a clearly defined task. When the task requires some lateral thinking, extrinsic rewards hinder the accomplishment of the task.

Alan Lurie is also writing about motivation in his article. Both Pink and Lurie see intrinsic motivation arising from autonomy, mastery and purpose. All of which are lacking in the current educational model. Students have little autonomy. Lot's of mastery and little purpose. What would a model of autonomy look like in a school? Certainly not like the corporate environments described in this Slate article. Autonomy would look a lot like the concept of education by appointment. It would look a lot like gifted education, where students discover their passions and run with them.

Mastery is something that we may or may not do a good job with in education. Open source software and blogging communities are both examples of communities where mastery, individual thought, and contributions to moving the project forward are valued. How can we bring these sorts of communities into our classrooms where students are competing to show off their mastery of skills, concepts and attitudes?

The assistant principal in our high school is looking at this video. It will be interesting to see if he brings this video or these ideas into the staff meetings.

Teaching Naked

Wow!  I've been mulling over the idea of teaching naked, the last couple of days since I first saw this posting on Dean Sharski's blog.  My initial thoughts were wait a second.  Content is supposed to be what we're all about in schools.  Then Jose Bowen turned up again on the NPR all tech considered podcast, and I started to more fully understand his ideas about turning learning around.  He contends taht students come to class without any understanding of the subject, listen to a lecture, study like crazy and try to show that they understand.  Instead, he proposes a model where students listen to the lecture ahead of class, take a quiz or some other assessment to show that they listened to the material, and then discuss and explore the content in class.  As he states in the video above, most lectures last for 48 minutes and then have 2 minutes of questions, this way he can offer the same content and fifty minutes of questions.  To me these are powerful ideas.  I've already shared them with our high school faculty.  Several of the teachers are interested in giving it a try.

Then I drilled into Jose Bowen's site a little and found a set of podcasts that serve as the listening ahead of class for hs hstory of jazz course.  I listened to the bop and hard bop podcasts. I was struck by the fact that at the beginning of this podcast, he launches in right away noting that any categories are provisional, and this is just one way to organize and categorize the whole movement of Hard Bop.  Reminded me right away of David Weinberger and Everything is Miscellaneous. Very interesting ideas.  Even Bowen's old courses at Georgetown look like they built on diverse ideas. Anyone who can incorporate Wagner into a course on politics and culture has a lot of interesting thoughts.

High Noon

I just finished reading Jean Francois Rischard's book, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to solve them. I was very pleased to see global poverty as one of his main underlying themes.  Knowing that such passionate and intelligent people are running our world institutions is very heartening. 

Rischard's main thesis is that two forces are shaping our future.  One is the demographic explosion, with the world's population forecast to reach 8 billion by 2025. Rischard sees no good in any of the implications of population growth.  However, the other force, that of the New World Economy, which basically finds new ways to do everything, abounds with opportunities.

Others have blogged about his list of twenty global problems, so I won't reiterate the list here.  As an expat living abroad in what is basically a tax free haven, I am not fond of the idea of the Canadian government instituting worldwide taxation.  I am not the American model of wordwide taxation is particularly effective.  Currently the foreign earned income exclusion is currently set at $87, 600.00, and $18.4 billion dollars claimed as exclusions, which is about half of what US citizens earn abroad.

Rischard proposes two possible solutions.  One is for people to come together in global issues networks (GIN) around each of these twenty issues. (he does acknowledge that there may be additional issues).  Each GIN would enlist members from governments, business, and NGO's. Essentially, each GIN would draft benchmarks and then score each country with respect to the progress they were making towards meeting that benchmark.  His alternative solution is to use the G7 structure and add additional countries to create "G20's" made of responible ministers around each of the 20 issues.  He sees this solution as less desirable as it's track record so far has not demonstrated that it has the agility and flexibility needed to address these issues in a timely manner.

This book was written seven years ago.  Rischard was right on the money when he wrote that global financial architecture was an issue that needed a global regulatory approach.  However, we are now a third of the way through Rischard's twenty year timetable.  While reading the book, I was thinking how depressing for him, none of the solutions he proposes have been taken up.  Neither the Global Issues Networks, nor the G20 models.  The urgency around these issues, even global issues has not gained traction.

Rischard also displays a great openness to new ideas.  At the conclusion of he book, he asks for reader input at his website http://www.rischard.net.  Unfortunately, this domain has expired and is now parked, so there is no way to evaluate the quality of responses he received.

21st Century Skills

In an article entitled "Programming: The New Literacy" Marc Prensky writes:

Thirty years from now, will the United States
be more competitive with a population that can
read English at a tenth-grade level or with a
population excellent at making the complex
machines of that era do their bidding? The two
options may be mutually exclusive, and the
right choice may determine our children's place
in the world's intellectual hierarchy.

This is the need to teach our students how to program, whether that be Excel spreadsheets, html pages, php and MySQL or C++. He who controls the machines is going to have enormous power in the 21st century.

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