Arthur wrote: > One theme that seems to run through discussions here is related to this > issue. Is it the educators' mission to find just the right motivational > buttons and push them just right ??? Or rather focus on responding > appropriately to those who come to the learning process with some > critical mass level of motivation??? > > It seems to be one of the fault lines, in some of the discussions here.
You're right; this is very insightful. Also in the category of motivation you might add "operant conditioning" and related methods of shaping behavior through positive reinforcement and other techniques. Consider this book by an ex-Dolphin trainer: "Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training" http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/0553380397 From there: "A groundbreaking behavioral scientist and dynamic animal trainer, Karen Pryor is a powerful proponent of the principles and practical uses of positive reinforcement in teaching new behaviors. Here are the secrets of changing behavior in pets, kids--even yourself--without yelling, threats, force, punishment, guilt trips...or shooting the dog: The principles of the revolutionary "clicker training" method, which owes its phenomenal success to its immediacy of response--so there is no question what action you are rewarding". Clearly these methods can be used to shape how children or adults act in a B.F. Skinner "Walden Two" sort of way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two Although I might add a third possibility -- hierarchical *force*. You compel the child to learn, or at least go through the motions. We all know this doesn't work well, delivers small results for lots of resources, results in pathologies among students, and so on. But, it does result in some apparent results, which can be motivating to the authority figure themselves in an operant conditioning sort of way. And it is the basis of the theory of modern compulsory schooling -- force kids to deliver themselves to schools between certain hours and go through the motions whether they are interested or not. Peer pressure might be another variant on this; to feel compelled to participate because peers appear to be doing it. But isn't there general agreement these days that using *force* is not a good way to teach? For comparison, learning to drive a car can be a very stressful nerve wracking experienced for some -- and entails far more personal danger than most programming tasks, yet almost everyone learns to drive. As Gatto says here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm "Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. ... Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. ... Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone? It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. ... Notice how quickly people learn to drive well. Early failure is efficiently corrected, usually self-corrected, because the terrific motivation of staying alive and in one piece steers driving improvement. If the grand theories of Comenius and Herbart about learning by incremental revelation, or those lifelong nanny rules of Owen, Maclure, Pestalozzi, and Beatrice Webb, or those calls for precision in human ranking of Thorndike and Hall, or those nuanced interventions of Yale, Stanford, and Columbia Teachers College were actually as essential as their proponents claimed, this libertarian miracle of motoring would be unfathomable." So with all this potential danger to drivers and society, people make the investment to learn to drive because they want freedom (or just need to transport themselves for a job, to get food, etc.) and society lets them because cars are part of the bedrock of US society. On the other hand, modern cars have been engineered to some extent to be easy to use (compared to, say, Ford Model T's). They have standards across all cars ands pretty much the same capabilities so even when the switches are in slightly different positions, so if you learn how to drive one car, you pretty much know how to drive them all, so there is a big payoff long term. (Contrast this with programming; maybe we need a big shakeout of programming systems. :-) Then again, there are lots of different driving styles. So even when you know how to drive mechanically, there may be various tips and tricks stylistically people should learn to be safe drivers, and then how do those styles get taught or learned? Of course, even if kids start programming on their own, I'd perhaps be more concerned about how to you communicate the stylistic parts "programmer safety" to be a responsible member of the programming community the same way driving courses might focus on "driver safety". :-) Perhaps using Python (or a similar dynamic language) should be taught from a "programmer safety" aspect? Python programs have a lot less security risk from buffer overflows, for example. :-) A modern car is effectively a robot, considering all the electronics in it -- "stability control" being the latest addition. Equipment with embedded computers is becoming more and more common in all sorts of areas -- even greeting cards -- although paradoxically it seems computer programming is taught less and less from what I read here and elsewhere. More and more of using some applications is actually what might once have been thought of as programming -- word processor macros, spreadsheet templates, mail filters, Google queries, writing web pages, modifying images, building 3D virtual worlds, configuring your desktop operating system or cable modem/router, and so on. Perhaps is programming becoming like AI -- in the same way once a computer can do something it is no longer considered "intelligence", perhaps when most people can do something like make a spreadsheet that is no longer considered programming? For general purpose programming (in Python), how attractive do you need to make an activity before kids want to do it? They all want to drive, even if it is both hard and scary to learn. Maybe the importance of computers to modern society is just not as apparent, similarly to how the value of learning to write well is not obvious in the K-12 environment (other than for letter grades)? On the other hand, one might argue learning to program is more like learning to fix your car. And who fixes their own car these days (or even changes their own oil)? With front wheel drive cars now common -- combining power plant and transmission in a single engine compartment (partially as a cost savings measure for production) -- there is not much room to work on a modern engine or transmission. And who has all the right tools now that so many operations require specialty tools? So, perhaps, is programming going the way of fixing your own car? Yet, free and open source software is countering this trend towards more specialized closed systems. And computers are more and more important to daily life. --Paul Fernhout _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig