Jon, your paper brings to mind a few things that I have been thinking about lately. One is the idea of gamification in courses. I wonder if some of the appeal of games isn't that they are bounded in specific ways with knowable rules. As both a student and and a teacher, I was always aware of the need to "find out what the professor wants" in order to get that A. That is, I wanted to know the rules of the game. In some ways, gamification reinforces the established teaching-learning patterns. It may even speak to a need many feel for extrinsic pressures to perform. Competition as well as collaboration might be one of the benefits of social learning.

Only one of my five kids loves to get up and ride a racing bike every day--the others are like me in that they know exercise is good for them and it is fun once they get started, but they need some outside motivation. It usually comes in the form of encouragment/pressure from friends, loved ones, doctors, or scary Internet videos. As a teacher, I tried to remember that many, if not most, of my students felt about learning English composition the way I feel about exercise. It will never be a natural pursuit, but that does not let me as a teacher off the hook with respect to doing my best to create an environment that supports those who need the extra push as well as delight those who don't.

It's true that assessment is mostly used as an enforcement tool, but it seems to me that ideally it's a learning tool. In active learning situations where people learn by applying content to solve a problem or create something new, what they produce is evidence of what they have learned. Reading and writing are the main tools we use in academic learning, but there are many ways we can engage learners in these activities beyond the essay and test that invite cheating and plagiarism.  So I would like to see assessment and teaching more closely aligned rather than decoupling them.

Speaking of plagiarism and cheating, I really like what you said about the appropriate role of teachers--they don't need to make students do anything, including refrain from cheating. I do think, though, that while teachers should not be required to provide pedagogies to enforce compliance, they should work with learning designers to provide learning activities/assessments that make cheating and plagiarism irrelevant. Policing for plagiarism was not a role I could ever accept as a writing instructor--we may well come upon plagiarized material in student writing in the course of giving feedback, but that is a teachable moment, not an occaision to penalize beyond a failing grade. And the social and professional consequences of being caught cheating or plagiarizing should be part of the disucussion in any writing course.

As  you said, education is not only about job skills. Learning ways of thinking--the kinds of theorectical lenses that anthropology and sociology provide, for example--has always been the greatest value of a university education. While outsiders sometimes make amazing leaps that forward a discipline, for most, the socialization into a professional discourse is a necessary step for moving ahead in life. The autodidact often comes up with a skewed version of a discipline that is not helpful, and I think this can happen in networks of learners without sufficient guidance. It makes being a teacher in this kind of environment all the more challenging. Educational developers take it as a given that university professors mostly have not really learned to teach or design courses well. The new learning environments put us all in that boat. We all need to learn new ways to share and create knowledge.

Thanks for a stimulating paper!

Thanks for the stimulating response, Mary!

I largely agree re gamification, as long as (as rightly you imply) it's not pointsification. I particularly like that you can fail frequently in most games and only progress when you are ready, able, and willing -we can learn from that. Apart from anything else, accreditation would be less harmful if we could keep trying until we succeeded. Not sure about competition, though: it can have a place but can be two-edged sword, especially when we are seeking creativity and expansive thinking, and it can put pressure on in ways that can be positively harmful to both winners and (especially) to losers. The educational game can and maybe should be played to win, but it doesn't have to be part of the rules that winning means beating others, let alone scoring points.

Re motivation, it is certainly true that there are things we need to do which do not intrinsically motivate us (at least, not straight away). Social support is indeed crucial: it really helps to see that what we are doing matters to others, that others care. It is also a critically important teacher role to help learners to see why doing something unpleasant or to which they are indifferent aligns with their own personal goals and values - it's about encouraging internally regulated extrinsic motivation rather than pushing, I think.

I totally agree about assessment as a learning tool: I know of no theory of learning that does not explicitly emphasize the importance of feedback, and learning goals are really useful things. The problem is not assessment as such (though grades are normally a bad idea) but accreditation. As you say, there are lots of ways to provide evidence of learning and lots of means of assessment that naturally lend themselves to providing such evidence without accreditation becoming the reason for learning.

I agree about plagiarism etc too.  If we divorced accreditation from learning then it would largely vanish: we would be letting people learn, not making them learn. It would make no sense for learners to cheat when literally the only person they are cheating is themselves. It would be almost inevitable that learning designers would design activities that make plagiarism irrelevant, too, because the only reason for undertaking them would be to learn, not to (summatively) assess. For now, given the constraints that we are forced to work under, I agree that mindful learning design and constructive alignment can make a huge difference.

I think it remains one of the most critical roles of universities to nurture scholarly networks, and it makes great sense to continue to teach much as ever, as long as we don't force learners to comply, so I'm not too worried about the perils of autodidacticism as long as we nurture those networks wisely and teach well. I think it is useful to have scholars with a duty of care in such networks, who can help to minimize the risks, but there is also a role for crowd-driven collectives to help sort the good from the bad (including those scholars). Without such means of identifying value, as well as checks and balances on those means, self-organizing networks are potentially dangerous, thanks to Matthew Effects, filter bubbles, and echo chambers, amongst other things, that can reinforce bad patterns and ignorance: good for networks, bad for learning. Of course, that is not a bad description of academia in general. It's one big web of trust that, with its tribes, disciplines, peer reviews and so on, illustrates all the good and bad aspects of self-organizing networks! In many ways, it rewards the already rich, separates more than it connects, is filled with cliques, is answerable only to itself, and reinforces doctrine. Of course, it does have mechanisms designed to soften this, but that's the point: those mechanisms are designed. We can improve those designs.

"Re: Perhaps more alarming, many felt under pressure to reach their daily targets (79%) and that their daily routines were controlled by Fitbit (59%).

Uhm, a research study on the (positive) impact of such devices on (bad) habits one wishes to discard would be ideal at this point in time -- thoughts?

Indeed, sometimes a bit of extrinsic motivation can help to get us over humps. If you weigh 200 kilos then the good of reducing that probably outweighs the harm of extrinsic motivation, as there is immediate and pressing danger to self, and extrinsic motivation can often achieve immediate results. But it is still not a good method. Long term, it is positively harmful to cultivating lifelong habits that persist, unless you keep piling it on indefinitely. Short term, at best, it is far less effective than cultivating intrinsic or internally regulated motivation, albeit that it may achieve its effects more rapidly at first. Typically, it kills intrinsic motivation stone dead.

Theory distinguishes two distinct forms of extrinsic motivation: external regulation and internal regulation. External regulation is nearly always bad, unless non-compliance would cause immediate harm (e.g. we might externally regulate our kids if they are doing something dangerous or unkind). Internal regulation can be very good. It comes in several flavours - introjected, identified, or integrated  - where we do things not because they give us joy, but because (for instance) we feel we should (it fits our beliefs, or what we believe others think we should do), or because it aligns with our image of ourselves, or because it is needed to achieve some further goal that matters to us. Such internally regulated extrinsic motivation is both necessary and useful, especially when it contributes to a sense of self-worth and value, and it can contribute to achieving a sufficient level of performance to become intrinsically motivated (e.g. when we practice scales to become more capable musicians). This is why I greatly prefer tools like my Pebble watch that simply inform us, thereby supporting us in reaching our own goals and cultivating the habits we want to cultivate. This is why good (human) trainers help trainees to find the motivation within themselves, to reflect on what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it, who praise effective behaviours rather than the individual, who listen to what trainees want to achieve, who explain the value of doing things a certain way, illustrate the problems with bad habits, show that they care, lead by example, and so on. Good teachers help students find reasons that matter to them for doing things they don't naturally enjoy doing, and support them in overcoming humps along the way.

Dumb devices that achieve those ends by telling you to get up and jog, and berate you for not meeting goals you did not set yourself (whether by implication or directly) might achieve immediate effects but they are either deliberately or inadvertently creating an addiction. Short term, it works, but it has the opposite effect when you take it away. There have been literally thousands of studies and experiments that have shown this quite conclusively, across all walks of life. Knowing this, for all the short-term good it may achieve, I think it is positively immoral to continue making such things.

re: "Good teachers help students find reasons that matter to them for doing things they don't naturally enjoy doing, and support them in overcoming humps along the way."

and "...good (human) trainers help trainees to find the motivation within themselves..."

Point taken. Thank you for the informative paragraph on motivation. 

I need to learn more about what is available in wearables, including the Pebble watch you mentioned. 

I find your posts both informative and interesting- thanks! 

password strength: https://xkcd.com/936/

Thanks Jon for this informative review.

Just for sharing: I found

Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com/

is very helpful to me to organize and store phf files

oscar

@Richard - app decay is a major problem. I've had apps that I've paid plenty for that are no longer available and, of course, free ones that I rely upon come and go all the time (more fool me for relying on free apps). Same is true of things that are built-in. I hate the new Apple Notes which, of course, ties you to iCloud: the one and only reason the old version was worth having was that it could use any IMAP account for storage. As I mentioned, we don't own our devices any more. The same is even true of cars. When they rely on a complex ecosystem of operating systems, other apps and cloud services, the control is in the hands of the seller (or whoever buys the seller), not the purchaser, and we only ever have a licence to use them. Even Linux boxes suffer a bit from app decay, though to a much lesser extent, especially as they are far more likely to use standards that do not change anything like as fast, and that usually remain backwardly compatible. For the record, I still use an iPad 2 from time to time, and it is so far fine. The iPad 1 gathers dust, the iPhone 3 lost its screen, and the iPhone 4 is without a SIM right now but was OK last time I checked, a few months ago. The hardware is still fine but, indeed, the range of apps that run on them is diminishing all the time.

@Viorel - I too had a first generation Intel MacBook Pro (circa 2006 I think) that died early this year and is only dead now thanks to cats: it hadn't got operating system updates for a while, but it was trundling along nicely with nothing more than a new battery and upgraded hard drive in all its nearly 10 years of operation till cats poured water on it. I still have a working Asus laptop from around 2003: its batteries (in days when batteries were replaceable I always used to buy 2) are both down to 5 minutes, and it would die if subjected to Windoze, but it runs Lubuntu very happily, if a little sluggishly with its 768MB of RAM and first generation Celeron.

@Oscar - yes, it's a good app, though it's another cloud-based system that could be yanked or changed at any time, and the DPT-S1 doesn't support it. I'll have another try at the iOS app - I found it OK a few years ago but I don't trust Mendeley with my data, especially now it is owned by Elsevier. I think Zotero is a safer, if rather less slick, option.

Jon,

First the history. :-) I have a Radio Shack TRS-80 4P that I upgraded the drives to double-side panasonics the day after I bought it. It still runs and all the software still works. :-)

I have a Toshiba laptop - my first Toshiba laptop. Still has Win95 and I long ago turned off updates. I keep it because it has a REAL RS-232 port on the back that I use to talk to  my galss furnace and annealer via RS485. It's currently on my side desk as a serial test device as I cannot get my son's Zaurus to communicate with my Raspberry Pi 3 via serial. The PiDP8 (PDP8 copy that uses the RPi as it's engine) is  running Multos  right now and I need a serial terminal to connect a second user. The Zaurus is reliable and portable (and I have the serial cable for it). It was last used to do the initial configuration of a Sun Sparcstation V440 in 2005 which only allowed serial console.

As for devices, you are correct. My phone does work as a phone and a texting device - something my old Nokia would not do well (text, that is). It's the apps that annoy. All the map applications quit last year and now the Navionics only works via wifi. Hard to use at the dive site.

As for Linux, I'm not so sure. I just did a big installation using VirtualBox on my PC in order to build a reservoir simulator from source. It worked on Ubuntu 14 but not 16. Turns out someone (expletive's omitted) allowed a broken beta package of a critical library to make it into the release version of 16!

I'm also running with updates turned off as the latest set of Ubuntu 16 updates destroys the unity desktop. Real fun doing an update only to end up with nothing but a blank window. It's been a known problem since U12. As much as I love open source, sometimes letting these folks loose on so-called stable builds is not the best action plan.

Even the latest VirtualBox update from the grand master of the buy-up, Oracle, has had problems. It's hard to embrace open source when it can't keep itself running for more than two weeks!

Of course I long ago turned off all Microsoft updates on my Win 7 box. Far to dangerous to let Mickeysoft tamper with things once it's obvious they no longer care, and only want to force Win10 on the world.

My 2005 Macbook Pro is still running, but without a battery. The installed one died, so I bought a replacement from Asia. It lasted two years then suddenly expanded. I noticed when the mouse/trackpad cursor developed a mind of it's own. Took out the (then) removable battery and all was well. It's been running that way for the past 3 or more  years. Of course it cannot be upgraded past Snow Leopard but that's not really all that bad.

My 2012 Macbook Pro is still running and 'updateable'.

One could argue that it's the way with all things computer, but I know many people that are still getting adequate server life out of Linux or BSD running on old 386, 486 and Pentium boxes.