Two key components of motivation are autonomy and mastery. Autonomy is giving your learners the freedom to choose how they learn. Mastery is providing visible recognition when competence is reached. Both of these areas can be addressed by applying gamification techniques to your courses.
As we research what it actually takes to “address the whole person” when creating DLE, we encounter a series of challenges. For one, a person is actually a series of, or a collection of, personas, with different personas depending on the role being “played” or the circumstances and relationships existing.
And since PSA posits that learning is a natural focus of a being’s life energies, and that being “bored” and “turned off” or “not present” is the opposite state… and anathema to learning…. roles and personas that create bored, turned off and not-present conditions are to be avoided if at all possible.
If you want a good student, or a good employee, keep them fully engaged.
Sounds obvious, but the problem is that many existent “appropriate roles and personas” are not really designed to do that in effective ways. For example: yes one can modify behavior by various means, but what are the accompanying costs of the methods used? One can get conformity by creating roles and personas that encourage it, but then what do you do if you need the creative and self motivated roles and personas too?
Here’s an article focused on one part of that challenge of addressing the “appropriate” persona for the situation. Corporations increasingly provide cloud based tools for a varied list of “training needs”. In a “business environment” people bring a certain “professional” persona or “businesslike behavior” to the circumstances they are in.
It’s a role we play, but like all roles, the actual boundaries of what is or isn’t acceptable in that role, are changeable, and not always easy to define.
Such is the case in SLC. Which roles are appropriate, and when? The author mentions a challenge in the “workplace” when the word “game” or “gamification” is used in training. Games sound like “play” and a “workplace” is about “work”. A problem.
But this is just one challenge in a much larger problem: as all learning involves a “whole person” not just the parts that seem to be “allowed” in a specific environment. Schools, if one examines the conventional models, have a long list of behavior control elements and role defining constructs in place.
Generally the old models of learning and training…lean heavily on restricting the parts of a person that can be “present”. Be quiet, and raise your hand to speak, and wait until the teacher calls on you. Even bathroom breaks are “monitored”. These are obvious, but some schools lean heavily on other behavior control and “role defining” mechanisms, such as uniforms which are less obvious. And some form of punishment is usually present.
If one examines all the aspects of education and training as it is practiced, we see that it does address the “person”, but not the whole person, and not in ways that are likely to allow the “whole person” to be present and to support learning.
Old models of education “work” by eliminating roles and personas from the circumstance, to get to a very narrow range of acceptable roles. This solves some behavioral problems, but at the cost of personas and roles that are needed to support learning.
When PSA attempts to find and create the learning “roles” or “personas” most favorable to using the individuals natural learning energies, or inclinations, to what degree are we going to be able to transcend the problems of “control” of roles and personas that traditional education employs?
Clearly some of that control is because circumstances seem to require it. Safety needs to be maintained inside the learning space, for example. But what if the learning environment was dramatically different, as cloud tools suggest might be possible? What control would need to be implemented then, and what would it look like, and could the negatives of present approaches be routed around?