My family and I spent last week on vacation in San Antonio. On Tuesday, we visited Sea World. Sea mammals appear to be very complex and intelligent animals. They can be trained to do quite amazing things.
As we sat watching one of the shows (Baluga whales and dolphins, I think), I found my mind wandering - and wondering. We always refer to animal trainers as, well, trainers - never educators. However, I heard more than one of the trainers talk about “working with” the animal - not training it. (Odd, but “working with” is the same language Alfie Kohn tends to use when discussing progressive forms of education i.e. education as “working with” kids as opposed to “doing things to” kids.)
How are animals (like the sea mammals) trained? Well, I’m no expert but I can certainly speculate. Start with a behavior the animal does naturally, use reinforcement (positive and negative) and shaping to condition the desired behaviors. Condition these behaviors to specific stimuli. Punish undesired behaviors until extinct. Sounds like Skinner’s Operant Conditioning to me.
But isn’t operant conditioning common in schools? Isn’t what we call traditional education very much like operant conditioning? Memorizing and stating facts with grades as reinforcement seems consistent with it. Practicing procedures on worksheets seems consistent with it. Much of what we refer to as classroom management appears to really be behavioristic control. Yet, we never refer to K-12 experiences as training.
I’m not sure where such thoughts lead… but as I watched the whales and dolphins and thought on these things, I felt quite sad.
Note: I guess I’m opening myself up to the argument that education is meant to be beneficial in the long term (after the students grow up) and not necessarily in the short run, whereas training is meant to be applicable now (or very soon after the end of the training). I guess I’d argue that this is a real shortcoming with what we call education.
Moodle is a very popular open-source Learning Content Management System used by numerous businesses and educational institutions across the country. I started this site (www.g4classes.com) to investigate Moodle and provide teachers and students access to eLearning that they might not otherwise have. (Later I got interested in blogging and started the LearningForward Ed Tech blog you’re reading now.)
A couple of months ago I upgraded from Moodle 1.7 to Moodle 1.9. It seemed safe, there were no active classes going on. It also seemed very simple… I surely didn’t need to back up the site. Oops! Was I wrong! Blew away the whole site.
Anyway, I’m rebuilding the site. I’ve just finished a “course” that is a demonstration of using Moodle to implement a Family Heritage Site. Following the walled-garden concept, it provides a family with a variety of tools to capture and preserve family heritage, including:
- A news forum where postings are sent to all family members enrolled in the course.
- A reunion discussion forum for coordinating the next family reunion.
- 2 databases for sharing pictures, from the most recent family reunion and favorite pics to be shared. These databases provide fields for the photographer’s name and a description of the picture.
- A database for written family stories. These stories include the author’s name, the story’s title, the story itself, and a picture.
- A oral history project where family members can record or submit recordings of family stories.
If you get a chance to take a look at the course, I’d sure like to know what you think… Do you think the Family Heritage Site would be useful for families? What could be added that would improve the site? Any comments would be much appreciated.
In Jeopardy style… the question is
What’s the quickest way to destroy intrinsic motivation to learn?
See the story here.
Alfie Kohn explores this in a number of his articles… one of which is here. Here’s a quote from the article that explains the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation:
“The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.”