Tuesday, October 12, 2010
A Different (and Very Modest) Proposal
Suppose, instead of the previous suggestion, I were to reward each student monetarily in the event that everyone fulfilled the minimum blogging expectation in a given week. (We could make the amount a percentage of the princely sum that St. Mary's College is paying me for the semester!)
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7 comments:
can't wait to see this one. :D
I feel less strongly about this. I doubt that it would work. Not because we have reached a higher plane of existence where we have completely transcended material desires, as I suspect that we are all broke or near to it and as such are desperate for money, but rather that material desire is not our primary motivator; we pass by money-making schemes all the time.
Your last two blogs have been interesting. This quality has engendered responses from myself and others. If we could all continue this trend, I imagine that our collective participation would increase. However, it can be a difficulty to pluck a single thought from the broad landscape of our mind. It may be helpful if we were to consider a topic each week. Then again, it may not.
To improve our activity, I think we need to change our approach to blogging, not the results of blogging.
Also, I was under the impression that you were not being paid by St. Mary's.
Further manipulation, I suspect...
I'm glad you weren't proposing we all eat our children.
In regards to a monetary reward for blogging, this extrinsic motivation would undermine any intrinsic motivation students would have for blogging. We see this problem with reward programs for encouraging younger students to read. Say I love to read and will do so without any extrinsic reward. Then, someone starts paying me $1 for every book I read. This extrinsic reward undermines my intrinsic love for reading, and eventually I will grow to like reading less. I would come to view reading as work.
Ideally, we would all love blogging, but this is apparently not so. Still, if you have any students who do love blogging, your proposed motivation, I think, would actually eventually lessen their desire for blogging.
The general consensus is that neither punishment nor reward is likely to be effective. If so, perhaps this is because of the corrosive effect of extrinsic motivation, as Shelby says.
So, where does this leave us? Is it possible to motivate students to do something they are not accustomed to in any way at all?
The trick seems to find some way to capture the raw enthusiasm for defending one's choices/actions -- good or bad -- and redirecting it toward actively seeking out new experiences and challenges.
A few weeks ago I went looking for academic writing about the phenomenon Shelby mentions in order to back a point in my paper. What I read is that extrinsic motivation did not affect intrinsic, positively or negatively. It threw me off, too, because I had been taught what Shelby said.
Just to confuse things a little. ;)
Dave may be on to something. I'll have to think about this.
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