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On Badges and Rewards: Gut Reactions and Real Life Connections

Last week, a school in Calgary announced the elimination of certificates and ceremonies honoring academic and athletic achievement. The school board’s rationale addresses issues around internal vs. external motivation, competition vs. collaboration, and provides research that supports the school’s decision.

Right now, fierce debate is taking place around the use of badges and rewards to motivate people. Everyone has an opinion. Educators, parents, course designers, HR specialists, marketers, and app designers are all talking about how to leverage rewards to fuel motivation. I expect that when you encounter the use of rewards and badges in education, you have a distinct reaction either in favor or against the notion. And your reaction stems from your our own personal values and experiences.

Let’s dissect this topic and see where it goes. First, let’s see what others have to say. Some diverse and well-written arguments include:

  • Punished by Rewards? A Conversation with Alfie Kohn by Ron Brandt. Kohn argues that both punishments and rewards are ways of manipulating students. He says that there is scientific evidence that rewards reduce the intrinsic curiosity and motivation that comes from being tasked with meaningful challenges. He also says that praise is an instrument of control, especially if it is used to gain compliance. He argues that educators should focus on meaningful content, engagement in a community, and choice, instead of rewards.
  • I Don’t Get Digital Badges by Jackie Gerstein. Gerstein gives an overview of some of the main arguments against the use of badges and and highlights the the work of Alfie Kohn, Daniel Pink, Daniel Hickey, Bron Stuckey, Terry Heick, and others. Ultimately, Gerstein presents research-based evidence that badges do not equal motivation. She also argues that simply adding badges to a learning task does not result in the gamification of learning because badges do not provide formative assessment, and are not usually based on learner choice.
  • Learning Badges by Degree of Freedom. In this blog post, the author examines his experience in a MOOC where he earns badges and poses some thoughtful questions about how the recognition of badges is being debated by licensing bodies, organizations, and employers.
  • 7 Things You Should Know About Badges by Educause. This document is a great introduction to what badges are, how some educational institutions are using them, and what’s next in the development of badges as both formal and informal credentials in education. It takes a positive, informative approach to the concept of badges.
  • Mozilla Open Badges. Mozilla has taken an open concept approach to badges as ways to learn, issue, and display them as credentials for a wide variety of purposes by anyone or any institution. The project aims to help people recognize others as well as receive recognition based on specific accomplishments or skills. Mozilla has also created an electronic way of collecting and displaying badges in a Badge Backpack.
  • The Teacher’s Guide to Badges in Education by Edudemic. This article presents widely-held positive views on badges by drawing parallels between badges and gaming, pride in achievements, and goal-setting. It states that badges help to push students to try harder, think differently, and try activities that are outside of their comfort zones.

So there are supporters as well as opponents. The above posts also point out a diverse array of purposes that people see for badges such as:

  • Checklists or a series of actions to be taken
  • Choices of tasks to choose from
  • Verification of credentials or skills
  • Rewards for completing tasks
  • Tracking of levels of accomplishment or skill
  • Ways to pique interest and invite someone to take action
  • Presentation of a challenge or task

It seems that the uses of rewards generally fall into four categories: motivation to complete, recognition of achievement, assessment, and/or tracking.

Next, I will examine some personal interactions with badges and rewards. (This post is turning out to be a very reflective experience!) Examples from my own life include:

dragon_boat_medal

This made our sweat-drenched practices much more worthwhile.

  • Dragon boat competition – This summer I joined an amateur dragon boat team and had a real blast. We unexpectedly won a bronze medal in our division at the Calgary Dragon Boat Festival. It was a thrill just to be there but I have to admit that winning a medal made my aching muscles much more worthwhile.
  • Nike Training Club – This is one of my favorite apps. I’m not as motivated by the badges as I am by seeing the number of minutes I have accumulated through my workouts over time. There are different levels and focuses to choose from for each workout, and the instructional videos are fun and easy to follow.
  • Inspiration from people at the top of their game – From watching elite athletes compete in the Olympics, to world renowned researchers speak on TED Talks, to following people and organizations on Twitter, they motivate and inspire me to learn more, connect with people, and take action. Many of the people that I look up to have won awards or received recognition that helps them to gain the spotlight, increase their reach, and distinguish themselves.
  • Gaming – I don’t play many games, but there are a few that I enjoy. Developing skills and achieving the next level is a huge part of playing any game, online or otherwise. There is also an element of competition that fuels me.
  • Grades and formal credentials – Anyone working toward a degree, certificate, course, or any other type of credential knows that the final reward is the recognition of having completed it.
  • Black belt – Twelve years ago, I earned my black belt through my dojo, Okinawa Gojuryu Karatedo Kujekai. I put many years into this and consider this to be a source of immense pride. I also had a short but amazing experience at the Calgary Tai Chi & Martial Arts College where I practiced wushu. Both were incredibly valuable experiences.
  • Career – Many people consider their job to be a source of pride. When you accomplish a project or achieve a new position, you have something new to put on your resume, kind of like a badge.

My personal experiences include both intrinsic drive as well as external motivators. There were times when I considered quitting karate. A complex web of elements blended together to help push me through. They include:

  • Dedication to myself as a martial artist
  • Motivation to earn the next belt
  • Making friends with people in my karate club
  • My love of practicing and performing specific moves and skills
  • The curiosity that my friends had through their pop culture experiences with martial arts movies
  • Expectations and support from my Master and my family
  • How I was feeling at the time, or even that day

At any point in time, each of these motivational elements moved to the forefront or background on my journey to reach my goals in karate. They ebbed and flowed, and changed over time. I cannot isolate a single motivation. Likewise, on a day to day basis, I can say that working out with my Nike Training Club app could be classified as 80% internal and 20% external motivation. Usually. Tomorrow I might be ultra-motivated and classify it as 90/10. I don’t see anything wrong with this combination, or acknowledging that there are both internal and external forces that make up my own motivations. Could it be that badges and rewards do not constitute an all-or-nothing approach, and that viewing them as part of a cause and effect relationship is driving the current debate in inaccurate and polarizing directions?

For you, a badge may be motivating because it helps illuminate the path you are taking to achieve a goal. For me, a badge may mean formal recognition for achieving something. Even within the term, ‘external reward’ there are many personal interpretations and definitions. So what seems to motivate a student is likely a combination of different elements that we are interpreting as a single force of motivation.

My initial reaction to the debate around badges and rewards was to reject their usefulness and argue that internal motivation is the only constructive way to approach learning. However, my brief personal analysis leads me to conclude that internal motivations cannot be generalized, and that in reality, a complex mix of motivating factors helped me to reach my goals. Motivation is not a simple equation.

What’s your gut reaction? How do rewards play out in your daily life?

Three Approaches to Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0) including a Marshall McLuhan Moment

Lately I have been thinking about what the term Web 2.0 really means. According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 “allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them” (para. 1). The description of users as passive consumers refers to Web 1.0, the era when most people did not create content online; they simply used the Internet to research information so it travelled only one-way, from the computer to the person.

The following YouTube video posted by jleister titled, 3 Phases of Educational Technology, does an excellent job of explaining the progression of student and teacher technology use from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 by breaking it down into three parts. jleister emphasizes that all three phases are equally important in the learning process, and that during a single lesson, all three may be present.

Briefly:

  • Phase I – teachers use technology as one-way mediums for disseminating information, such as showing video clips or PowerPoint presentations to a passive student audience. The visuals help students to understand concepts more clearly. This use of technology maintains the teacher’s role as the disseminator of knowledge and controller of the structure and organization of the classroom.
  • Phase II – students begin to interact with the technology to acquire content knowledge instead of full reliance on textbooks or teacher lectures. They conduct online research, read, or view media that they search for themselves. However, the structure of the lessons may still mimic phase I.
  • Phase III – students become producers of media. They create images, presentations, audio, and/or texts, and what’s more–they share their creations with others and interactively review others’ work. jleister argues that we need to focus on modern skills of communication, collaboration, and creation during this phase and think of students as producers of information, not just consumers of it. I feel that this is the essence of Web 2.0.

Next, I found an excellent animated video titled, Evolution Web 1.0, to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 by davidEPN. It highlights how Web 2.0 is moving into Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is:

  • The development of an intelligent, omnipresent web that is an extension or continuation of what we presently understand the web to be
  • Involved in a continuous learning process that anticipates users’ preferences, such as the recommendations that Amazon provides as you shop
  • Increasingly interconnected appliances including cars and phones that communicate with each other, becoming more and more present but less visible. They learn about our lives and make individualized recommendations in increasingly automatic ways
  • Web 3.0 opens the door to machines converting data into useful, meaningful information, otherwise known as the semantic web

Finally, I will refer to the thoughts of someone who was way ahead of his time. Marshall McLuhan, considered by many to be the father of media theory (and a great Canadian thinker, I might add!), contributed to our understanding of technology’s influence on us before we even knew it was happening in the 1960’s and ’70’s. In the following clip, marshall mcluhan on the media posted by matsutakneatche, McLuhan explains:

  • All media is an extension of human faculties: the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing is an extension of the skin, and electric circuitry is an extension of the nervous system
  • The extension of any one sense displaces the other senses and alters the way we think of ourselves and the world
  • The literate (book) world emphasized the visual, and made us detached and isolated from the other people since reading is a relatively private activity. McLuhan calls it “not involved”
  • The electric revolution and the information age is where “involvement is total”
  • The information explosion becomes the culture
  • Artists are the only ones who live in the present on the edge of change while most people live in the age just behind them because it is safer

Takeaways:

I am completely intrigued by each one of these videos and thinkers, but even more interested in what happens when we take them together in the context of Web 2.0, 3.0, and beyond. My thoughts are:

  • Perhaps after the information explosion (that McLuhan identified), the semantic web will begin to limit our access to information by bombarding us with only the ‘recommendations’ that have come about from the complex programming that goes into semantic systems. There will be a semantic culture if you will, that will develop from the interpretation of billions of tiny bits of information that users input into the web connecting everything, without even knowing it. And this semantic culture will not only be invisible, but will continue to evolve until what began as ‘recommendations’ will become automatic ‘decisions’ that are made for us.
  • After jleister’s phase III, we must consider students themselves to be learners as well as teachers in a never-ending learning cycle of researching, learning, synthesizing, creating, and reviewing. McLuhan’s term, “total involvement,” defines the role of schools as helping students develop their skills and understanding of this cycle. Furthermore, we will have to re-think what we refer to as curriculum, since the value that we place on particular ideas or knowledge isn’t half as important as how we interact with it. This draws upon McLuhan’s famous idea that “the medium is the message“. Instead of focusing on curriculum, we will have to focus on the learning cycle.
  • What does it mean to live in the present as opposed to the age that has just passed? I believe that technology has become a medium that extends our thinking and the way in which we connect ideas, learn, and think. Our concepts of time and collaboration have also changed through the immediacy of information and access, the range of people that we can collaborate with, and the permanent nature of what we share online. Perhaps living in the present means accepting that we will be forever less private and more connected with people, things, and places, even when we think that we aren’t.
  • Will there still be phase I and II learning in this world? Of course! If I know nothing about a particular topic and ask someone about it or look up an article online, then I am engaging in the first two phases. However, I believe that our notion of ‘baseline understanding’ of any given topic will change completely. After all, with so many more sources of information, the lines between opinion, educated opinion, and fact will become increasingly blurred. Baseline knowledge may decrease in importance while sound arguments based on a wide range of sources will become more important. Thus, phase III will become much more prevalent and may put ‘untouched’ baseline knowledge to the test.

I will definitely delve into the thoughts of McLuhan and the road to Web 3.0 in future posts. This topic is incredibly intriguing to me! What are your thoughts on our journey into the future? What about living in the past or present? And what of technology as extensions of ourselves? Please share!

(Image: Brains, by neil conway. 2009. Available under a Creative Commons Generic License.)

From Scroll to Book to Internet: Educational Technology Changes Everything

New technologies can change everything–what and how we learn, know, understand, communicate, socialize, and think.

Many people have enjoyed the video called Help Desk, posted by Zauron3ooo, that hilariously depicts an interaction between two monks as they try to figure out how to use the new technology of the book, as opposed to the old way of the scroll.

I believe that Help Desk is a great prelude to this video called Joe’s Non Netbook, posted by sabestian. In it, an educator has a candid conversation with a teenage student about the difference between his textbook and the Internet.

What do you think of these two videos, examined together? A few brief thoughts from my brain include:

  • a move from linear to completely non-linear thinking (also a huge part of e-books and how they have re-defined literacy)
  • a struggle between how things were done in the past, and how they are done now, but no less effort or willingness to learn
  • the importance of learning about and discussing the medium or tool that is used to learn, share, or create, no matter what the content may be
  • the importance of organizing, linking, and categorizing information in the process of learning

What are your thoughts, connections, or opinions on both of these videos? I would love to know what students and teachers come up with when examining them together.