Motivating the Individual AND the Group

In this week's reading, Dirksen (2012) discussed the importance of designing for motivation. She referenced Csikszentmihalyi (1990), the pioneer of Flow model, which is, in part, characterized by learners being cognizant of the short and long-term goals and knowing of the immediate tasks they need to accomplish to get there. Dirksen (2012) used the Flow model to actualize her own framework for "chunking" goals (i.e. immediate goals, short-term goals, and long term goals). Her framework is depicted in below.

The immediacy of accomplishing short-term goals acts as a motivating motivating for the learner as it keeps them on track to accomplishing the long-term objectives. Curiously, I wondered, how this framework can be applied in online environments where the goal is to have students collaborate on a task? Surely, groups collaborating together would require a similar framework for motivation as an individual learner would.

I contemplated over what other theories or frameworks could effectively supplement the organizing structure of Dirksen's "goal-chunking" and Csikszentmihalyi's (1990) Flow Theory to incorporate learning in an organization or group context. After all, the connectivist era has illuminated such a necessity.

What about Harasim's (2012) Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) Theory? According to Harasim there are three stages of collaborative knowledge construction in a group:

  1. Idea Generating- this is the brainstorming phase where dissimilar thoughts are gathered.
  2. Idea Organizing- the stage where participants compare, analyze, and categorize the idea via constructive discourse and argument.
  3. Intellectual Convergence- an artifact is created as a result of the intellectual convergence and synthesis of ideas.
The phases of collaborative knowledge construction provided by Harsism may integrate well with this framework given by Dirksen. If we consider the three phases above as the short-term goals of a collaborative task, For example, if the objective was to have students collaborate on the creation of a wiki page for an existing wiki resource, the immediate goals could be the course readings and discussion contributions to your group and class discourse, short-term goals would be the phases of OCL, and the long-term goal is to publish one (or several) collaboratively constructed wiki page(s).

References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row. 
Dirksen, J. (2016). Design for how people learn. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Harasim, L. (2012). Learning theory and online technologies. Routledge.


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