incognito

I leave today for a three-day writing retreat sponsored by the School of Education at USF. The retreat is in a remote location and I won't have access to email or the web. If you post a new research review at your group blog, please go ahead and also email me the article PDF. I will add the PDF link to your review sometime on Monday. Any questions or issues that arise will also be answered sometime on Monday. Have a great scary weekend!

assignment re-alignment

A lot of new blog entries have been posted. In addition, we’ll be listening to a fair number of book conversations over the next seven weeks. In order to make sure things don’t get too hectic, I wanted to announce some changes and some reminders:

1. The learning materials for Sessions 8 and 9 (anxiety and the self) are optional only learning materials. They are not required. This means all of the required learning materials for the last two class sessions will be student-generated.


2. Britte Cheng will begin responding to the flow article questions pretty soon. Remember the deadline for posting a comment is November 5th, and the last day she’ll post a response is November 7th.


3. Dale Schunk will respond to questions about the self-regulation article between November 5th and November 13th. In turn make sure to start reading the article relatively soon so not everyone is posting a question at the tail end of Dale's visit with us.


4. There will be 3 book conversations posted around November 8th that need to be listened to by November 21.


5. There will be 3 final book conversations posted around November 21st that will need to be listened to by December 5.

In addition, group blog posts will continue to emerge. Work around whatever is the best schedule for you to read and comment on the various group blog posts.

shigeru miyamoto

Serendipity or cause and effect? Any way you look at it, today's San Francisco Chronicle features an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. As stated in the article:

Shigeru Miyamoto, 55, has often been described as the Walt Disney of video games. Formerly Nintendo's first staff artist, now its senior managing director, Miyamoto has been responsible for some of the most beloved games in history, including Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda series.

More recently, he has helped return Nintendo to the top through the development of the best-selling Nintendo DS and Wii systems, which have outsold their competition, redefined the industry and ushered in a new era of gaming. His latest act was creating a wave of casual and family games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit and his latest title, Wii Music, all of which encourage people to use their whole bodies to play.

The interview is interesting, and provides some additional information on the evolving nature of gaming, links to flow, and potential (down the line) impacts for education.

miyamoto interview link

conversation one & next assignments

I've just posted the conversation Kimi and Amy conducted yesterday about Stipek's book Motivation to Learn. This is required listening.

amy & kimi book conversation

For our next class session on Goals you'll need to:

1. Listen to the Goals audiobook
2. Listen to the Amy & Kimi conversation
3. Post at least one comment or question for Amy & Kimi regarding their conversation
4. Post one question for Britte Cheng about the Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi article

This is also an excellent point in the semester to begin exploring what the various other blog groups have been posting. Make sure to leave them a comment so they know you've visited. Questions posed to them are even better!

flow class updates

I have posted two additional items to the Flow page within the Learn section. Here's what I've posted:

1. Alicia & Gwen's multimedia presentation on flow (plus a PDF providing references)
   
2. A video of the presentation by Csikszentmihalyi himself at the TED Conference given in 2004.
   

Both of these are optional downloads, but I'm sure many of you will find them helpful.

session 6 on flow @ learn section

four profile interviews

I've now completed interviews with 4 undergraduate students. All the interview audio files last between 15 and 20 minutes. You can download all four as a package. I've reposted and slightly renamed the first interview so all of these audiobooks show up under the same album in the audiobooks area of iTunes.

There's no requirement to listen to these interviews, but you may find them quite interesting. Consider these optional learning materials.

Each interview is in audiobook format, and the chapters are named according to the specific question asked. The complete download is about 51 Mb.

four profile interviews download

interview one

I conducted an interview with an undergraduate yesterday using the questions you developed during group activities in our last class meeting. The interview itself was very informative. The interviewee is currently in her junior year. There's no requirement to listen to this interview, but some of you may find it quite interesting. Consider it optional learning material.

The total interview is just under 19 minutes long. It's in an audiobook format, the chapters are named by the specific question asked.

interview one download

motivational profile questions

I've tried to select the best questions from those proposed by the two different groups last Friday. Essentially there were 4 common questions (so I used those) and then I selected 4 more questions from each of the two groups. With a bit more shuffling I put them into two categories and created an order for asking the questions ("general" ones first, "school" ones second).

I'll be doing 4 interviews with undergrad students. If you have the time to check over these questions, please feel free to provide feedback about question wording, or question order, or other things. However, since my first interview is Friday morning, I can only incorporate feedback for changes if made by this Thursday evening no later than 10.

General

1. What do you like to do in your free time?
2. Tell me three goals that you have set and succeeded at.
3. What are three things that you have failed at and why?
4. What are you most proud of?
5. Who would you consider a role model (dead or alive)? Why?
6. What do you see yourself doing in five years?

School

1. Why did you decide to go to college?
2. What projects have you liked at school?
3. Describe your most fun class (grades aside).
4. Describe your least fun class (grades aside).
5. What type of clubs or organizations do you work with?
6. What is your dream job? How do you plan to get there?

We'll see how these questions work in practice, but hopefully they will provide greater insight into the motivational profile of some undergraduate-level students.

gleeson adds great new feature

I just learned about a new feature Gleeson Library at USF has added to its online functionality.

In essence this new feature allows you to identify books you'd like to check out and then have them ready for you to pick up at the Gleeson Library front desk. (If you're a USF faculty member then they'll actually mail the books to your school's mailroom.) This new feature is in pilot-testing mode right now. Here's how it works:

Once you've clicked on the request button then you'll see the following screen:
For some of you this new service could be a major time saver. Those crafty folks at Gleeson keep coming up with great ideas.

visiting scholars update

As of today four of the five blog groups have visiting scholars that will be participating in a class e-discussion. And the fifth group may also have a visiting scholar. You can now see a special section of the sidebar (to your right) titled visiting scholars. This area will be updated as needed. If a link is "active" (i.e. in bold blue type) that means there is currently an article to download and a post where you can submit questions for that particular scholar.

I've ordered the visiting scholars based on the deadline when questions need to be submitted. Currently Bernard Weiner is our first scholar, and Ed Deci will be our last. The date to the right of each scholar's name indicates the last day for submitting questions.

more and better

Alonzo King and the LINES Ballet will be performing in San Francisco from October 17 through the 26th. Pharoah Sanders will be providing the live music. Those of you in the Creativity course are already aware of Alonzo King through reading two interviews I did with him.

The San Francisco Chronicle had a short interview with Alonzo in yesterday's Sunday paper. When answering one question Alonzo said, "I'm reminded of a woman whose life I admired. Near the end, people asked her, 'Would you do anything differently?' And she said, 'Just more and better.' I'm guided by those two words, more and better."

five questions for alonzo king

conversations update

The table below provides the most current information I have regarding the audio recording of the various book conversations. Notice that this version of the table includes both a recording date plus a listening date. The "listening date" is the deadline for people to, well, listen to each conversation. As the table indicates, there will be one audio conversation to listen to before the November 7th class, three before the November 21st class, and a final three before our December 5th class.

Please feel free to ask me questions of any sort about these conversations as you get closer to your recording date.

blogger copy and paste

On Friday I noticed a problem one person was having with Blogger. We finally solved the problem, but I thought it would be easy for others of you to run into the same issue. The quirk arises when you copy text from one document (e.g. Word) and then try to paste that text into Blogger. Sometimes it doesn't work right (to be precise: sometimes it seems to place the text outside and below the compose area). The issue seems to arise depending on the mode you are using. Check out the image below:

As indicated in the image, you need to have the Edit HTML tab active. All works correctly in terms of copying/pasting in this case. However, if for some reason you have the Compose tab active then pasting text doesn't work correctly. I don't know why this is, but I now know this is what will happen.

As a reminder, the bottom part of the image shows you where you can insert a category (or what Blogger calls "labels") for your new post.

interest group blog opens

Today the interest group blog opened with a research review. Also check out the sidebar. Look for the section titled group blogs: for the flow group it now reads, "1 post." At this point all of the blog group pages are officially open!

interest group blog

article switcheroo

Last evening I learned a couple of critical things about some upcoming visiting scholars that changes our reading assignments slightly.

Change 1
The visiting scholar for the Flow Group blog will be using the article currently listed in the Session 6 learning materials. The article is Rathunde, K. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2005). Don't read this article for our next class, but you will be reading it at a later date.

Change 2
The visiting scholar for the Effort Group blog is Bernard Weiner. Unfortunately Dr. Weiner can't answer all of your questions (he'll tackle 6 questions only). To make the discussion work with him in a timely manner it's necessary that you read Dr. Weiner's article for the Effort Group by October 24th. I'll be creating a page where you can post questions based on your reading of the article. After Oct 24th, the blog group will then select six of the questions to forward to Dr. Weiner. You can download the article at the Effort Group's blog page.

effort group blog page

effort class followup items

I have posted three different items to the Effort page within the Learn section. Here's what I've posted:

1. The live audio recording from last night's class (this is mainly for Bianca and Nancy).
   
   
2. The visual models from last night. They are in two versions: the simple PDF and a QuickTime movie version that includes the visual model plus the audio explanation of the model.
   
   
3. The two handouts from last night (How to Debate Script and the Dweck visual model). This download also includes the full written article about Carol Dweck as presented in Stanford Magazine.
   

All of these are optional downloads, but I'm sure many of you will find them helpful.

session 5 @ learn section

flow group blog opens

Today the flow group blog opened with a research review. Also check out the sidebar. Look for the section titled group blogs. For the flow group it now reads, "1 post."

flow group blog

group blog posts & summary view

Some of the blog posts for groups will be fairly long. This can mean a lot of scrolling for the user just to see the posted topics. Thus, to make viewing of the various post titles easier, when a group blog has more than one post then I will convert their blog page to a summary view.

What's a summary view? It means pretty much what it says: it shows just the beginning of a blog post. To read the complete post you can either click on the Read More link at the end of the summary, or you can click on the post title. Both links take you to a permalink view where you see that full post, and only that post, complete with comments made by other students.

The downside of this approach is that Blogger does summaries in a "funky" manner. It shows about the first 400 words of a post. That's fine in and of itself, but the design problem is the summary view removes all formatting such as bold type, line breaks, ignores images, ignores headers, etc. So the summary view may look a bit "ugly" in some cases. But, click on the Read More link and you'll see the properly formatted full blog post.

You can see what I mean by visiting the Self-Regulation group blog that just made their second post.

self-regulation group blog