The surprising truth behind what really motivates us

Everyone once in awhile I peruse LifeHacker or TED just to see what I can see, and I come across something interesting and exciting that couldn't be more relevant to something I happen to be working on. Such was the case with this video what motivates us:



Facilitating the "iTeach Essentials" course for the past year and a half certainly validates the information in this video. Although it's true that the kind of people who would be sign up for the course are already probably highly motivated, I have found that by the end of the course, most participants report feeling really energized and motivated to learn more and do more, and many report that they can't wait to begin completely redesigning their courses.

One of loveliest emails I've received recently was from a recent course participant who told me that he was so motivated by the iTeach course and the Barnes seminar that he'd recently attended, that he planned to spend several hundred dollars in retroactive money he'd received (which came out of a collective bargaining issue) on the purchase of a comprehensive suite of software that will enable home to add a lot of new multimedia and redesigned graphic content into his online course.

The information in this video aligns closely with many conversations and efforts by various councils and committees in our system, and I personally plan to try to promote more local and system-level conversations around ways in which we can identify professional development efforts that actively identify specific and support opportunities for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose in our faculty and staff.

Where to begin?

Tomorrow I'm scheduled to do a presentation on social networking and Web 2.0 in higher ed at one of the colleges in our system. There is so much happening in the field that sometimes it's difficult to know where to begin and where to end!! Social networking alone as it is being used in college classrooms could be a whole presentation in itself, and yet I know people will be curious about all of the different websites and resources that they have heard about but not necessarily experimented with on their own. It's always a challenge to try to make a presentation relevant for those who are completely new to the technology and terminology, and yet present some new, interesting, and fresh uses and ideas to those who have already been using them for awhile.

Just this morning, as I was reviewing some of the information and ideas I was thinking of including, I came across something I'd meant to look at and forgotten about: Twitter lists. Under the heading of "just how fast can I learn how to do this so I can include it in the presentation?", I googled it and found a mashable site that gave a general overview of how to use it, and then created a list of my own and added a few people to it. It was really easy to create the list and add people to it, and I can see right off the bat how helpful this could be in a typical four-year college classroom (where most students are 18-21 and are probably already Twitter users), but I wonder whether or not, in a community college setting, whether it could set up a "digital divide" between students who are using Twitter, and those who are not?

I created an "iTeach" list, thinking that perhaps I'll encourage the next class of iTeach participants to try it out!