SUMMARY OF THE SEMESTER

This semester has quite honestly been a whirlwind. It only felt like it started yesterday and yet last week was our final week of lectures!!! I have learnt a great deal during this semester while studying motivation and emotion with James Neill. It goes without a doubt to say that I have taken motivation for granted most all my life. I believed I understood why I made the choices I made, but after taking this unit it was clearer to me that understood little about the why. Moreover, understanding the deeper side of our physiological needs, intrinsic-extrinsic motivation and one’s sense of self (to name a few!) has given me a much better understanding not only of my own motivation and emotions, but also why I may lose motivation and much much better ways to address and deal with these drops. Admittedly, during the semester I had drops of motivation (I would find it strange if one didn’t…) and had slack moments, but I don’t believe I would have been able to pull myself up were it not for what I had learnt during the course of this unit.

Additionally, what I feel needs to be mentioned about this unit in particular is the method of assessment. For those of you know don’t know.. us students had to create a text book chapter for wikiversity <LINK> on a particular element of either motivation, emotion or both. I chose narcissism, you can read it here <LINK>.  We also had to create a multimedia presentation to accompany and summarise our chapter and… you can watch mine here <LINK>. What I felt was special about this was the fact that it wasn’t a KRAMMING test. That is, to write a text book chapter one has to research…. Think critically and show this in their writing. My personal belief is that for a test that one simply crams facts and small bits of information (factual knowledge as compared to concrete knowledge) into their head to regurgitate during the test and then it all slips out of the mind. Do you find that yourself? I personally feel I retain knowledge gained from an essay for much much longer than I do from a test. Furthermore, as the chapter and multimedia components are hosted on world wide web (www), ANYONE can read it! Anyone can comment! We are open to feedback and comments on our work from the whole world. When a final exam is complete, the learning (in some ways) may simply stop there for that particular subject/aspect, however, as the chapter and multimedia are on the web, what effectively happens is that the learning experience goes on. Wikiversity will always be able to be edited and commented on and the same goes for the multimedia. So this effectively creates an ongoing learning experience for those who still check or better yet, maintain their wiki chapters!

Additionally, some people felt daunted by having to use technology for the assessment in this unit, this didn’t bother me as I am a bit of a tech head, I like technology and computers, I have studied programming code (html, c++ etc) and I have a CIT certificate in computer animation and graphics. It would do those of us who don’t yet know how to use this technology to learn, as the technology around us continues to grow and evolve we too must be a part of that! As this WILL become an integrated part of how learning is delivered in the future. Granted, there are those teachers who have not yet embraced it yet, however, the way this unit was delivered was very innovative and I feel has given us a much richer and absorbing learning experience. I am happy to say that even though the semester is over for this unit, the learning most certainly doesn’t end here.