Motivation

I am in the midst of a "project" of my own, a presentation to be given to the staff, as part of a rotation of such presentations, about my department. I am thinking about motivation, and whether my own experience sheds any light on what my students do.

I have spent many hours over many months discussing content with my department, taking photos, and putting together the presentation (twice, because quite at the last minute I decided to dump PowerPoint in favor of Prezi, which, by the way, I have never used before). I want it to be a quality presentation, but at times I wonder about the whether the time expended has been appropriate, since the story could be told in a more straightforward, simpler way.

My motivation, besides a desire for a true representation of my department, has been that I do not want to bore my peers. Not sure if I will succeed there or not!

But I realized that there is something else going on in my head, too. I don't want it to appear -- in comparison to what all the other departments have done or are doing -- lame.

More feedback

I did a Moodle survey about technology in my Justice and Peace class, where tech abounds, and I had a sense that at least some students were getting either frustrated or overwhelmed. And it's true, some were, although there were positive responses as well. The tipping point seemed to be when I assigned the final project to be done on Wikispaces. One more thing to learn! Diigo frustrated some also. In order to cut back on tech I announced that we could drop the blog we had been keeping. There was a bit of an uproar. "Not the blog!" It seems that some of the students liked that very much, writing what would have been assignments anyway in this medium where they could read what one another had written.

The blog has not entirely met expectations. I'm not sure how much they really read unless required. And I haven't pressed for a wider audience. But if some of my students see value in it, that will stay.

As for the final project, someone pleaded, "can't we just do PowerPoint?" I ended up making that concession, allowing for the alternative of PowerPoint plus a paper (because the PowerPoint, I have insisted, is not going to have a lot of text, so the information has to go somewhere for me to read it) instead of the wiki. Now, PowerPoint  -- that is something they are comfortable with.