BLOG #1

My take on Motivation in Learning:

Motivation can be hard to find in technology mediated environments, where there often aren’t set meeting times, making accountability for completing assignments and meeting deadlines difficult. My personal experience with learning is that there is a level of accountability and initiative that must be taken. In order to learn, I also need to actively engage with the content, by taking notes, discussing with others, completing practice questions, and writing/reflecting on the content, and believe that my personal learning style aligns well with connectivism and constructivism.

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My Experiences with Education in Technology-mediated Environments:

I have taken a variety of courses using technology- mediated environments, including short safety training courses, courses for professional development certificates, and high school courses. Through these experiences, I was able to understand how the online environment of the course can support learning and motivate people to learn.

In grade 12, I started an online course on the history of BC First peoples, taken through a learning management system called Moodle. Initially, I had been motivated to take this course as I had to fulfill a credit requirement and wanted to learn more about history, as it was a subject that interested me. Although the course content itself was interesting, I found it hard to keep myself accountable for completing the assignments and studying for quizzes, especially when I had other schoolwork, extracurriculars, and work to worry about. I also found it difficult to stay engaged as our knowledge of the content was tested with quizzes, and there was very minimal engagement with other learners in the course. Essentially, it was a very independent course, which I personally did not work well with. I think the course could have been designed to have more interaction, whether that was with other students, or even a variety of types of media like videos, infographics, or even podcasts. 

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Final Thoughts:

My biggest takeaway from the readings and my reflections on my own experiences is that learning environments can have a big impact on how motivated one is to learn, and how efficiently they are able to learn. I think it is important to implement a variety of different learning strategies and resources into learning environments, to accommodate different learning styles.