8845 - Mod 1: Topic 1

The Learning Switch

Learning is a physical activity, and a function of the brain. While the brain is not considered a muscle, it is regularly used as an analog to indicate that, like a muscle, exercising it improves its function. This analogy presents as an approach for understanding how we best learn, by investigating how we are motivated to learn.

Similar to how one summons the motivation to do physical exercise, learning too, requires willingness and commitment to act. When we commit to physical exercise, there is, in a sense, a motivation switch that triggers a signal to action: A signal that is engendered by the need to exercise.

Need as motivation in learning is readily illustrated in examples of the learned survival strategies of predator and prey, as well as, those of the earliest human forms. It is this real need to learn that, in our learners, many times is transitory at best. Importantly, this need to learn is distinguished as an internal dynamic, not as a teacher’s external perception that there is a need for a student to learn.

In this regard, it is the teacher’s role to create the internal motivation to want to learn. This is best achieved by actively involving the student in his/her own learning; that is, to allow students to construct their own learning. This style best expresses the tenets of the constructivist approach to teaching and learning. In this model, the teacher challenges students to take charge of their own learning and, at once, to devise their own strategies for learning. This process is similar, as previously suggested, to the construction of survival learning.

Students know that they need to learn. In constructivist learning, the motivation switch is turned on when the student realizes that he/she doesn’t have to struggle with teaching styles: Easier learning is enabled by a quick transition to a personal individualized and internal best way to learn.

These former notwithstanding, the process of learning, constructivist or otherwise, is complex, and as such, not easily explained. In this respect, academicians rely heavily on theory. A case in point is my own preceding articulation. In a similar way, one can explain the purpose of learning theory in educational technology. (Driscoll, 2005, p. 2)

Quite simply, learning paradigms don’t change during the design of particular educational technologies, or of the instructional designs that would incorporate these; instead, the opposite is true. Moreover, educational technologies are seen as mechanisms that deliver instruction, and the actual technology of instruction (instructional design) as more important. In other words, the implication of learning theory on educational technology is explained by its impact on instructional design. (Anderson, 2008, p. 15)

In still another manner of speaking, learning is not activated by a computer on/off switch. It is turned on by using technology in an instructional design that instills an active need and desire to learn. The switch is a function of technology of instruction more than one of educational technology.

Anderson, T. (Ed.). (2008). The theory and practice of online learning. (2nd ed.). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.