Autonomy, mastery, purpose

by | Monday, June 21, 2010

This presentation of a talk by Daniel Pink has been making the rounds on the Interwebs. I am including it here just as a personal reminder for me to use in my teaching AND as an example of a wonderful presentation style. Check out

RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc[/youtube]

The three key factors that Pink describes as being inherently motivating are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Now think about school… How much of these three do we present our students? Too often school is about doing things someone else as prescribed, not for mastery but rather just to get it done, with little sense of the broader purpose for doing so. Is it surprising that school is demotivating?

This is not an issue of whether or not (or how) we should be using technology – but rather a more fundamental issue of why we have school in the first place.

What can we do to bring in these three into the classroom?

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Economics | Good | Bad Design | Learning

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Pomes on creativity

I am in Plymouth, England, for a week, as a part of our off-campus MAET program. I spent time today with the first year cohort, talking with them about creativity in teaching (with our without technology). One of the short (5-10 minutes) activities they completed...

Human-Centered values in a disruptive world

Human-Centered values in a disruptive world

I have seen the power of the market… But when it becomes the only language, when it becomes the only way of thinking about the right thing to do, it leaves us with a very impoverished sense of how to live together -- Giriharadas, 2018 Over the past few years I have...

Visual thinking

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

I was recently invited to speak at a series organized by alumni of the IDC School of Design, IIT Powai. As an alum of the same institution it was a great honor to be invited. You can see the entire series here (and I must say there are some awesome speakers there). My...

TPACK in Science Ed (Video)

Jamie Smith at Ohio University has created a Prezi presentation on TPACK in Science Education. I think it is a pretty good introduction to the topic. Enjoy

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

An essay by Mohsin Hamid (titled My reluctant fundamentalist) about the process of writing his novel "The reluctant fundamentalist." What stands out in this piece is an excellent description of the extended and often painful act of creation - in this case a novel. I...

Value in an age of free…

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...

3 Comments

  1. Bob Reuter

    I do think, in line with Ven & Vrakking (2007), that we can use technology to significantly improve learning & teaching in terms of the following design principles for education: trust, relevance, talent, challenge, immersion, passion and self-direction. But we have to use technology to empower kids (Resnik, 2007) instead of trying to fill them with (often useless) knowledge (understand “facts” rather than theoretical and explanatory concepts and models).

    Links:
    http://www.amazon.com/Homo-Zappiens-Growing-Digital-Age/dp/1855392208
    http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2007/10/from-informing-to-empowering005.html

    Reply
  2. Jordan Walker

    I would think that educating the teachers as to these facts would be a great step in achieving the results we all seek.

    Maybe a mandatory continuing education series with hands on demonstration and hard evidence to support the theory.

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. EduTech Today Newsletter » Blog Archive » Message from the Director - [...] my expectations. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and…
  2. EduTech Today Newsletter » Blog Archive » MAET News - [...] summer students completed a unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task…
  3. Demotivational Posters II | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Comments » Other related posts and pages: |Demotivational posters | Pomes on Creativity II | Autonomy, mastery, purpose |…
  4. Demotivational posters | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Autonomy, mastery, purpose [...]

Leave a Reply to Bob Reuter Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *