Demotivational posters

by | Friday, June 25, 2010

I have been a big fan of Despair.com and its quirky, dark humor. I particularly love the demotivational posters, with their beautiful inspiring photographs coupled with some deeply cynical or depressing message.

Today students in my MAET summer program completed a unit on motivation. They read the standard Ed Psych motivational literature (Dweck etc.) and also watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video (that I had linked to here). And then, they created a series of demotivational posters. These posters were created in Google Presentation, with images from Flickr and most importantly they had to use their ideas from either the readings or from the Pink video. [Incidentally the video was not created by Daniel Pink, nor by RSA, but rather by Cognitive Media.]

Here is what they came up with, click on the words to see the posters. The names of the students who created them is provided below the titles.

Incentives
Scot Acre
Patrick Gillespie
Marc Compton
Shawn Telford

Individuality
Kerry Guiliano
Aaron Moran
Mike Bammer
Julie Howe
Addy Hamilton
Motivation
Barb Bedford
Cheryl Schaefer
Hope Andres
Stacey Schuh
Rewards
Grace Bammer
Mary Wever
Jessica Steffel
Sarah Blazo
Curiosity
Craig McMichael
Chloe Tingley
Lial Miller
Katie Lorey

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Stuff Indian’s Like

After the success of Stuff white people like, can Stuff Indians like be far behind. Check it out... it has the occasional nugget that nails Indians and their behavior.

KJZZ interview on STEAM education

KJZZ interview on STEAM education

I was interviewed recently by Mark Brodie of KJZZ.org for a story titled: STEM Vs. STEAM: Educators Urge Adding The Arts To Classrooms. You can listen to the interview on their page by clicking on the link above, or the MP3 below. My piece comes in at around the 3:14...

Rethinking homework, some thoughts…

Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a "cliffhanger." As he says: These days, the homework I give isn't based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do 'at home' to reinforce...

Making it in academia! Hmmm…?

Making it in academia! Hmmm…?

The question of impact of one's work is something that all researchers and scholars care about, particularly in applied fields like education. The question, however, is how is impact to be measured? Over the past few weeks I have had a few instances where my work has...

Spring break 2008

Our first family vacation in over three years! New Jersey to visit relatives, Delaware to visit friends, and New York city for the big city excitement! Hectic but great fun. I took over 500 photographs, got back home and deleted around 200 of them - the remaining are...

Creativity & Teaching, new article in TCRecord

How do exemplary teachers incorporate creativity in their teaching? For her dissertation study, Dr. Danah Henriksen  interviewed several National Teacher of the Year award winners (and finalists), to better understand their beliefs, interests, and practices involving...

Play & Creativity Across the Lifespan

Play & Creativity Across the Lifespan

As a part of our series of conversations with creativity scholars we recently spoke with Dr. Sandra Russ, Louis D. Beaumont University Professor, and interim dean at the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychological...

Cheating in a test, why that’s the way to go

I just read this wonderful essay by UCLA professor Peter Nonacs titled: Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam. In this essay he describes an experiment he recently conducted in his game theory class. This is what he told his students a week before the...

How not to conduct research

Note: This post has been edited somewhat to (a) clearly hide the url, which I had not done a good job of before; and (b) to add a few suggestions in the last paragraph for some strategies to make it easier for the participants to take part in the study.  (September...

6 Comments

  1. sharmila

    Here is what they came up with, click on the words to see the posters. The names of the students who created them is provided below the titles.

    with regards
    Social bookmarking service

    Reply
  2. retro

    The cat one was horrible. But funny!

    Reply
  3. Chernah Coblentz

    Wow, just took a look at despair.com. Scary – I’m already channeling my dark side.

    Reply
  4. Veronica

    Didn’t really like the Curiosity poster, actually.

    Reply
  5. Andrea

    Oh my goodness, the Curiosity poster made me LOL. What a great idea for an assignment, too. Thanks to the MAET-ers for sharing them!

    Reply
  6. Jordan Walker

    My favorite is Rewards – interesting what athletes do to reward themselves…

    Reply

Leave a Reply to retro Cancel reply

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