I cannot teach anyone anything, all I can do is make them think

Socrates once said: 'I cannot teach anyone anything, all I can do is make them think'. And then there was Andrew Carnegie who said: 'People who can't motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.' Some teachers struggle to motivate their students, and some students find it hard to concentrate for long enough to learn anything. So what is this slippery, elusive thing we call motivation? We certainly need it to do anything, anything at all. But where does motivation to learn come from and how can we capture it?

Learning always starts at the personal level. Therefore, informal forms of learning should assume more importance (e.g. my girlfriend only speaks Chinese, therefore I am motivated to learn to speak Chinese). Informal learning has both intrinsic (self motivated) and extrinsic (externally imposed demands) motivation. I tend to agree but will maintain that informal learning is more reliant upon an individual's intrinsic motivation than it is by any external pressures. In other words, we learn because we are interested. When we move into the more formal aspects of learning, there the extrinsic motivation begins to be applied through a need to achieve good grades, complete successful projects and avoid falling behind your peers. The trick is to maintain an intrinsic motivation that is just as strong as if one were still learning informally.

 

This is one reason, I think, why personal learning environments (which tend to heavily represent informal learning approaches) are assuming an ever increasing importance in education. For it is within the PLE(personal learning environments) that students can truly pursue their own interests, motivate themselves to learn and generally capitalize on their personal talents and skills.