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This video is a very entertaining whiteboard animation of a talk given at RSA (described on their website, http://www.thersa.org, as "an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today's social challenges") by author Dan Pink (for more, see http://www.danpink.com/about). The question he poses, is "what motivates us?" The common belief that people will work harder for a bigger reward is found to be true only when the work involves simple, mechanical skills. When the work requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, a surprising reversal occurs: the larger the reward, the poorer the performance. Pink states that engagement requires three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though his presentation is addressed to the business world, I think that he's really addressing fundamental aspects of human nature that can be applied in education as well. For example, his claim that crappy products are the result when profit is separated from purpose, can be applied to education as well, when grades are separated from meaningful learning.

Great video and surpassingly simple. We do better work, when we are doing work towards something that interests us and that we are voluntarily invested in. That's not to say that we are invested in it voluntarily from the beginning, but that as we invest ourselves the reward is more personally gratifying. We are made happy by getting better at a task and mastering that task, we are made happy by engaging in abstract cognitive ideas that interest us. Money can not buy happiness, it can only buy a lack of cognitive effort.

This online-community-sourced interview with Sir Ken Robinson (British education adviser, author, and speaker) followed his TED talk about creativity in education. He makes some good points about the need to cultivate creativity in students in all areas of education (not just those traditionally associated with creativity, like music or painting). This is closely tied to the struggle to create motivation in the classroom and addresses an attitude more than a specific set of strategies.  He tends to talk more about math and science than language, but most of what he says can be applied to our field as well. He connects the idea of "teaching creativity" to "teaching literacy", but I would argue to achieve true literacy, you need those creative elements that are so often lost in the language classroom.

After getting past the awesomeness of the fact that the author's name is Magnifico, this article concerns itself with issues of audience in writing. Much of the article is a literature review summing up the current research in the area and how it relates to her future research. Some of the areas examined are the cognitive and socio-cultural analyses of the effect of audience on writing. She finds that the audience can be a source of motivation and that writing with the audience in mind can inspire new comers to ask themselves the same sorts of questions as expert writers, such as what is it that they want to say, to whom are they saying it, and how are they going to convey this message.

This is a technical discussion on dopamine, rewards, and time by neurologist Robert Sapolsky. His research has shown that the anticipation of reward is more pleasurable than the reward itself and this pleasure increases when the reward is not a guarantee, but a possibility. This kind of discussion may seem overly abstract and distant from the classroom, but understanding how motivation works, even on a neuro-chemical level, can help us to not only design our courses, but develop new approaches to generating enthusiasm and performance in the classroom. It is a good place to start when crafting (or re-designing) a teaching (and/or writing) philosophy. What are the rewards students associate with writing? What is our role in creating, maintaining, and providing access to those rewards? Do the rewards always have to be attainable? How do we frame these ideas for use in academic planning?

In this article, Oura discusses authentic materials and task-based lessons in ESL instruction. The more I read about motivation in the classroom and successful skill learning, the more I read about authenticity and  task-based lessons (as well as a couple of other things not explicitly covered in this article). Though I've many authors talk about these two topics, this article stands out for it's clear and concise explanations and included examples. Interestingly, the examples aren't authentic tasks for any class I foresee teaching, but I can see their value in other courses.

This article contains a variety of helpful recommendations in assisting others with essays, and beneficial of extensive methods in establishing coherence. There are also intriguing statistics about illiteracy and each section, as well as the subcategory within is very specific and unified. Essentially, the article revolves around the diversified nature of everyone's unique interpretation of writing and is magnified towards all students. There's also information such as: informing others, consulting others, approaching the students, entertaining them, acquiring the knowledge of their materials, appropriately responding, and using moderate persuasion. All in all, there are a total of seven recommendations with very concise explanations of writing instruction, analytical approaches, and assessing the quality of literary works. This article is applicable to our instructive endeavors within our micro, or macro, aggregates of situated learning. The content within this particular article will elucidate the path to molding students into strategic writers, capturing and sustaining motivation, and substantiating an enjoyable environment. So please give it a read! I'm sure you'll find it quite pertinent to our weekly scenarios of peripheral participation and consultative interactions.

This article describes the results of the four OLE (Optimal Learning Environment) approaches to teaching writing used at four different bilingual special education California schools. These approaches include: (1) interactive journal writing: teacher leads dialogue with the students by providing written responses to their daily journal entries. The teacher's responses serve as a model for writing as well; (2) Writers' Workshop - "students go through planning, drafting, editing, revising, final drafting, and publishing each time they produce a written product", i.e. their own class book; (3) expository writing as a process; (4) combination of brainstorm writing, model webbing or mapping the story they have just read, non-interactive journals. The authors emphasize the importance of engaging the learners into the informal creative writing process to increase the intrinsic motivation. They state that often in classes with bilingual students there is a high amount of pressure to speed the students' transition from writing in L1 to writing in L2, which triggers the students' anxiety and reluctance to write. The results of the 10-week experiment in different educational settings showed that OLE program activities significantly decrease stress and increase writing productivity. According to the article, OLE is based on "sociocultural learning theory", and makes use of task-based interactive creative activities. Students are supposed to collaborate while working at their writing (= communities of practice). Writing is considered as a continuous ever-changeable life process. It always implies dialogue (with the teacher, classmates or oneself - in case of non-interactive journals). Response The idea of interactive creative writing is beneficial both for heritage learners, and ESL learners, who often do not feel at ease while writing in L2. Having experienced difficulties in writing in the past, they tend to produce limited quantities of clichéd patterns that lack spo

I like how in your article it state what kind of studies they did. They did Interactive journal writing; Writer's Workshop; OLE; and a combination of journal writing, brainstorming and planning, and spelling practiced for individual group. I think that just using one method from here might help a lot but if a teacher use two or three methods here, then the L2 would improve even more. But i don't know...it's a good article.

Becker's article discusses the various models researchers have used to blueprint the cognitive process writers use during revision. The discussion associated with these models came from Becker's inquiry on why novice writers have negative attitudes towards the revision process in comparison to more experienced writers. The goal of this research was to make explicit the most effective and efficient cognitive strategies teachers could use to help novice writers improve their revision process. Most of the models consist of evaluation skills and long-term memory associations. I find this article useful for teaching writing in the sense that it has potential apparatuses that teachers can use to motivate students to revise their work. Because revision is an important and sometimes complex part of the writing process, these models may serve useful or may serve as templates for other models to arise when applied to teaching. The important thing here is finding ways to encourage students to revise their work and examine what processes students use to motivate them to revise rather than have students assume their work is already perfect.

This study of second and fourth grade students examines student attitudes toward writing. The study suggests that the culture of high-stake testing has placed teachers in a bind that forces them to teach writing aggressively, which takes the fun out writing. The younger the students are, the authors claim, the more positive their attitude toward writing is. The older they are, the more likely they are to come face to face with these higher stake environments and the more negative their attitudes will become.The study actually has fourth grade students meet with and tutor the second grade students in writing in order to measure the positive or negative affect of tutoring on writing attitudes. I was especially drawn to the passage that said, "Some self-efficacy researchers have suggested that teachers should pay as much attention to students' perceptions of competence as to actual competence, for the perceptions may more accurately predict students' motivation and future academic choices." (182).

This source details the author's experience of teaching a course called 'Experimental Writing' to college seniors. Using several chapters from the book Free Play by Steven Nachmanovitch, the instructor introduces the topic of play as an important element of the course. Having read the book myself I think that it is a worthy read, and it has influenced my approach to academic projects by widening my perception of my action as not just reactionary study toward a grade, but play within a field offered by the instructor where success and failure are accepted as process and there is no fixed upper limit to achievement. In other words the writing is can be thought of as a kind of 'funktionslust' a pleasure of doing, not simply an action toward an objective. To create motivation within students requires that they let go of the dire seriousness that school is associated with; school is something to be completed out of necessity not something that can offer individuals new insight to themselves, or the aspects of themselves that have been suppressed by conformity and fear. The author does not entirely endorse the use of Nachmanovitch's text in 'traditional writing classes' because the text discourages many of the elements that are at hand in the traditional approach to teaching (like writing for a letter grade). I chose to be an English major because I felt the most freedom of expression within my English classes; I was offered a choice of what topics to engage with. But increasingly specific expectations from teachers handcuffed my raw creativity. Even so, I think that an increased degree of freedom within writing classes would boost student enthusiasm. The question then is how do we increase the freedom of expression for students of basic writing, where there are necessary modes of measure for the articulation of the chosen subjects (other than simply allowing them to choose their subjects)? To what degree does the rubric shape student identity by for

In this article, L. Brent Igo researches the differences of both the competence and the beliefs views (two views which constitute self-efficacy) across three educational levels (high school juniors, college freshmen, and college juniors). He explores the idea of motivation for students to adequately learn. "Students who are confident in their ability to be successful on a specific task are likely to be motivated to engage in the task." Students are less likely to be engaged and interested in fulfilling an assignment when they lack confidence in that what they know is actually useful to completing such a given task. The nature of the task as well as an individual's prior experiences can determine one's self-efficacy within the classroom. --- this could be because of past experiences within previous classrooms and/or the lack of proper teaching/feedback from previous teachers. A teachers' feedback could also affect a student's perceived competence - the way in which the feedback is structured or what it focuses on could explain why students don't pick up on certain areas of composition as much as others.

The goal of the article was to broaden the current understanding of social contexts in education. It focused on student-teacher relationship from the perspectives of attachment, motivation, and sociocultural effects.

In this article, there are 21 steps to assist the literary councilor in teaching writing. Although it is a fairly short article, there is fairly useful information that can be extrapolated and applied to the multiplicity of situated learning that exist. A number of the steps actually have sub sections that pertain to the objective that is listed; furthermore, illustrating pragmatic, as well as feasibly applicable, instructive literary algorithms for assisting others in enhancing their writing skills. Truthfully, these steps contain information that isn't always brought to mind during our workshops; and I veraciously admit to relearning things in which I overlooked and/or have forgotten. Quintessentially, these steps can be applied to out workshop environment, and provide us with a helpful literary approach-instead of accidently sending the wrong idea, or running out of intellectual things to say (it happens to us all from time to time). Before we enhance our workshop surroundings, we should all endeavor to enhance our understandings of the procedural nature of excelling in writing, while simultaneously assisting others. In my opinion, teaching is one of the best, if not the best, ways to teach ourselves; instructing others reveals the hidden connecting points that we subconsciously always knew were there.

Hypermedia Authoring as Critical Literacy Jamie Myers Richard Beach This article talks about the benefits of implementing hypermedia into literacy education. Hypermedia or hypertext is a web tool that allows students to access school texts via the Internet and actively engage in annotating those texts or providing links to relating websites, pictures, or videos. Students don't have to just link either, they can create their own webpage geared towards whatever it is their doing. A student could make a webpage featuring a paper they wrote, with links to videos and pictures that the creator feels relates to the paper. It's a type of personalization that would motivate a student and make them view their writing differently. Free writing is a useful tool for helping a writer find their voice or develop their own style. Hypertext allows students to free write with freedom and creativity about particular texts, and puts their writing into conversation with other student's responses. Similar to the way we use dijgo, but with a focus on the inquires made into a certain school text. Discussion of the various posts can be made in class, to create a literal conversation on inquires and interpretations of a text.

In this article, President of Teaching That Makes Sense, Steve Peha shares his views, methods, philosophy, and applications of teaching writing to others. He addresses questions like "how do teachers achieve the best practice" and "what is the best practice for writing instruction?" Steve also has incorporated a chart that dichotomously sorts the attributes of the quality, process, strategies, reading-writing connection, philosophy, management and forms of writing. He also includes his "Six Traits" of evaluative criteria for assessing a variety of genres of writing. His arguments are quite applicable and logical, and his instructive guide is considerably pragmatic and "easy to follow." For anyone endeavoring to assist and critique others' writing on an academic plain will find this article to be of assistance. Even if there is a disagreement on some of the material, it is arranged in a way that can be slightly altered and still beneficially applicable.

I've decided to go in a different direction than the posts I have been submitting on diigo; however, where our research starts is certainly not where it finishes. I decided to approach the dynamics of voice and style and its relationship with "good writing." Moving along- This article directly engages in explaining "what makes good writing?" and how teachers view this complex question. Teachers alike analyze students' writing in very, very different ways and all hold their own literary interpretations in accordance to their curriculum. There is also much emphasis on "questioning a standardized writing style," "procedures and participants," and a variety of methodological approaches. There is also a list comprised of 31 perceptions on what establishes writing as "good." There is also much emphasis on the dynamics of structure, clarity, purpose, voice, and correctness. Near the end, there is an evaluation of controversy of a many statements revolving around "good writing", as well as "implications for the classroom." This is definitely a resourceful article for anyone endeavoring literary mentoring, and/or teaching of any kind. The diagrams are very concise and comprehensive, and above all, they are applicable to our instructive environments.

This article discusses the differences between the passive and active literary voice, choosing an appropriate tone, and effective usage of verbiage; however, it is written in a very instructively, concise manner and is easy to comprehend. There are recommendations for when to appropriately use the passive or active voice, as well as recognizing the certain challenges each voice contains. In total there are 16 steps to "improve your voice" and each step consists of sub-steps. There is also advice for establishing concise, precise, and simplistically, effective writing for your reader to grasp and enjoy. Although the article is rather short, it is very instructive and can be utilized as a beneficial source to enhance not only our writing, but also the students we are helping. It would make a great source to share and/or even post on blackboard learn under the ENGL 130 forum (for those of us in the workshop); or those mentoring anywhere else on campus.