Creating Significant Learning Environments
Wonderopolis from NCFL on Vimeo.
Welcome to Wonderopolis™! The National Center for Family Literacy’s latest contribution to family literacy, Wonderopolis is a place where parents nurture a brighter world for their children through discovery, creativity, learning and imagination.
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…as long as a task involved ONLY mechanical skill bonuses (extrinsic rewards) worked as expected
…once a task calls for rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward lead to poorer performance..
Why? Intrinsic motivators of autonomy, mastery and purpose lead to better performance.
HHMMM??? Wonder if this would work in our educational system?
Enrollment in Online Courses Increases at the Highest Rate Ever – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The Wired Campus article points to the reality that online learning is growing rapidly. The for profits like University of Phoenix, Kaplan and Capella understand this and see undergraduate online education as their “bread & butter”. Perhaps traditional Universities will start to understand this student demand and move toward meeting it. Consider the following numbers:
Jason Hiner of TechRepublic lists the top 20 iPad competitors. The most significant thing to note is that most of these devices will not ship on until 2011. Apple has recently gone to a yearly upgrade cycle with the iPhone so it may not be too great of an expectation to see the next version of the iPad in early 2011 as well. The competition is going to be fierce over the next few years and I look forward to seeing what devices will evolve from this process.
ASSUMING the Chronicle of Higher Education article is true and I am not so quick to assume that it is, this article points to a one of our most significant problems in education. A system that:
focus[es] on evaluation rather than education
and where meaningless work that can be easily created by someone who isn’t even in the course.
The author is a self confessed ghost writer who writes custom papers for students and claims that he as written thousands of vacuous scholarly pages, contributed a masters degree in cognitive psychology and a Ph.D. sociology as well as countless other undergraduate assignments. We all know that cheating is rampant in higher education and articles like this confirm the problem is only getting worse. In the article Anti-Teaching Confronting the Crisis of Significance, Micheal Wesch a social anthropologist from Kansas State and the creator of the viral youtube video Vision of Students Today suggests that our classrooms and what we do in them are void of meaning for our learners. Wesch argues that when we hear questions like: “How long does this paper need to be?” or “What do we need to know for this test?” we should understand that
Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.
When assessment, grades and credentials become the focus, is there any wonder that ghost writers that support cheating can exist and flourish in this type of environment?
