Motivation and Software Carpentry
At school, motivation was not really a problem for me where academic subjects were concerned. It hardly would have occurred to me to question the value of learning about maths and the sciences, since they were so obviously fascinating in their own right, and I had enough natural aptitude that my “expectancies” were almost always positive. No wonder I was seen as the arch nerd and didn’t have much of a social life!
There were exceptions to this of course. I did struggle to see the point of studying shopping patterns in Geography, and although I got good marks for essays in English, I did agonise for hours about how to get started. As for PE (Physical Education, i.e. sport) I was pretty hopeless. It seemed to be largely taken for granted by staff and pupils alike that its value was self-evident: I was unusual in not watching football (i.e. soccer) on TV or supporting a team. And in contrast to academic subjects, I don’t think it occurred to me that I ever could be good at any sport however hard I tried.
At university and beyond, life gets more complicated and, even in academia, the desire to understand the world is no longer enough. It becomes clear that life is finite, and every hour spent learning one thing means less time for others. Now I need not only motivation to study or work, but to choose among the many topics I would like to understand, and the many tasks that I could usefully undertake. Goals have to be weighed not just by their intrinsic value but by how they contribute to providing for my family, fulfilling my job description and possibly even constructing some kind of coherent career plan.
The target audience of Software Carpentry, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle of this path. They may enjoy the activity of programming and relish the prospect of doing it well, or they may regard it as a necessary evil that must be overcome to do the science they value. In fact the target audience, as opposed to the audience we get, probably doesn’t even regard it as a necessary evil. But in any case they have other things to do, and need to be persuaded that an investment of time now will pay off later, and ideally not much later.
Motivating experiences
Motivation comes only partly from what “teachers and fellow learners have done” but for the purposes of this study group, it is what we can do to improve the motivation of others that interests us. I don’t know if, or how, my general desire to understand and learn was shaped by parents, teachers or others, but I have dredged up a couple of stories from my memory where particular people did make a specific difference.
One of my PE teachers did put some effort into teaching me to bowl a cricket ball. I don’t think I really attached much value to cricket, but I did appreciate the way he taught me that I could get better at it if I put in some work, and I did get noticeably better at that particular part of the sport as a result, even if I still couldn’t run or catch.
Going on a school exchange to Germany showed me that German (and by extension other foreign languages) were more than tables of noun endings and verb conjugations. Seeing people go about their everyday lives communicating entirely in this strange medium made it seem like something that really could be mastered and used.
Demotivating experiences
I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, single out anyone other than myself who made it so, but I think the first year of my PhD (in particle physics) was about the most demotivating experience I have had in education. For the first time I really came to doubt that I was capable of mastering the material I was supposed to be learning. I got on OK with the programming and statistics, and the particle detectors, perhaps because I could apply them to my research project. I struggled with the more theoretical courses though. Their value seemed more abstract, which would not have put me off before, but for some reason I developed a mental block and convinced myself I just didn’t “get it” and there was little point trying to.
Perhaps some structured example classes would have helped in addition to the lectures and problem sheets. There certainly were example classes in the two-week summer school we took later in the year, but by that stage I didn’t really want to expose my own ignorance in front of the other students who, I assumed, all understood the subject already.
Motivation online
What difference does it make when the teaching is online? Probably not much when it comes to demotivating, which I think can be done very well via the Internet.
Coaching sport online has its own difficulties, although in the age of the Wii I wouldn’t write it off completely. What really made the difference to me was the individual attention, and the fact that the teacher could see that I was finding the classes difficult. I think that is quite hard to do online, especially with a large class. It is easier for a student to quietly drop out unnoticed when they are learning on the web, and harder to bring them back in.
The equivalent of a school exchange might be to spend some time working on a real software project as part of a team. The problem is that this requires a significant investment from the team, which does not scale to large numbers of students. Alternatively, a group project where students work together could give experience of software development, but without a contribution from “native speakers” this could prove frustrating.
Time spent
I probably spent two hours reading the book and writing this, but I have spent a lot more hours thinking about the subject and trying to work out how to convert my vague ramblings into a readable post. Time to let go.