What a perfect topic for this week. Seriously, only week 2 and all the excitement and enthusiasm is gone. I'm left with not but the bulk of the work. Or, was motivation such a big part of my experience this week because I've been reading and writing and reading and thinking and reading about it all week? In any event, my week has been full of existential quandary and angst as I try to sort out who I am and how I get to work.
The Experience
This week I picked up on my Ruby instruction where I left off last week. I did make one change however, in that I swapped out the Tutsplus.com tutorials for what, I think, are better tutorials on Codeacademy.com. These tutorials are much easier to follow, and rely less on PhP comparisons. They're more project oriented as well, which is helpful to me because it allows me to see how the concepts fit into the execution.
I learned this week about objects, integers, floats, if/else, and booleans. The mini project I did was a "translation" program that would translate what you type into Daffy Duckism. For example, if you typed, "I say, does this dress make me look slim?" the program would seek out the all the S's and exchange them for th's, then spits the phrase back out as, "I thay, doeth thith drethth make me look thlim?". Seems pretty simple and pointless, but it incorporated all the new stuff I'd learned.
I've included two screen caps, the first is my code in the Code Academy tutorial, and the second is my attempt to recreate it in Ruby itself. This fit nicely in with the Lynda.com tutorials which covered much of the same material, but didn't have a project associated with it.
Motivation Theory in Action
You may be wondering how this experience has any relationship to motivation theory. So far nothing I've written seems to relate at all to what we've been studying. That is because I didn't start at the beginning. The beginning was me laying in bed Sunday night dreading this week's learning blog. I work late on Sundays, usually getting home well after midnight. So, my motivation at that time was pretty low. My arousal state was next to nil, and I felt the cognitive miser inside me complaining about having to do any sort of learning, let alone something so foreign and rigorous for me as computer programming.
Monday I avoided thinking about the learning blog and focused on the reading guide. During which time I couldn't help but think about my learning blog. Reading about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation I wondered, "why am I doing the learning blog?" For the grade? for the knowledge? So I can fit in with all my friends who know programming? Why? What's in it for me? Which of the theories explains why I am choosing to do this weeks learning blog assignment?
I think it's important to point out the structure of the learning blog assignment here. It is interesting to me that we were asked to learn something that we're excited about. Almost anything would do, as long as it was something we wanted to learn. It seems like a perfect way to promote intrinsic motivation to do the assignment. Indeed I've been wanting to get my feet wet in programming for a long time now. Also, the blogging part of it is interesting to me too, so that shouldn't be a deterrent from wanting to dive in and get going. But! For whatever reason it was really hard this week to get going on it. I wondered if perhaps the extrinsic motivation, just simply by existing was somehow over shadowing the intrinsic motivation? Was I focused too much on the grade? For some reason the grading aspect of any assignment makes all graded experiences feel the same to me in two ways. First, I instantly procrastinate due to performance anxiety. And second, I always give a good effort when I finally get around to doing it, but usually take a much longer amount of time than I had budgeted. If the grade of the assignment is the extrinsic motivation, the desire to learn coding is the intrinsic motivation. The assignment utilizes both, though I have to admit I think the true reason I'm doing it is because of the extrinsic motivation. That is why I've never actually taken the effort to learn programming before. I guess to me I feel the weight of the extrinsic motivation more heavily than the buoyancy of the intrinsic motivation in this case.
This leads me back to an earlier comment when I called myself a cognitive miser. I think this is generally true of me. I don't possess that need for cognition. Though I get quick bursts of ambition to learn from time to time, my new pursuits generally don't last long. I think in terms of expectancy-value theory I fall under the great aversion to negative consequences umbrella. To avoid disappointment I tell myself that if I try and am terrible, then I can quit. (this aversion probably explains why I procrastinate my homework as well) With some exceptions I usually choose to quit after the initial burst of enthusiasm. (it's usually about this time in the learning process) Perhaps this is a bit of self-fullfilling prophecy? My own expectations to give up have led me into my cognitive miserliness of rarely trying in the first place? I think some of this anxiety comes from my locus of control. I do usually think that if something good happens it's because of luck, but if something bad happens it's usually because I screwed it up somehow. I don't want to discount the idea of hard work, because I see how working hard and giving a sustained effort also contribute to success. I guess I'm a hybrid thinker in this regard. I don't quite know how it all pieces together.
A quick note on incremental theory. Sometime in the past week I wrote in the discussion boards that I just don't have a programmer's mind. That little line came back to me, though I can't remember exactly where I wrote it, as I read about incremental theory, as well as the Carol Dweck article. The first thing Carol gives us in that article is the hint to never tell our children they are smart. I grew up my whole life being told I was smart, though I've never really bought into that... I'm more clever than smart and better at circumventing the system than mastering it... (maybe a bad place to make this admission?) Anyhow, I've had to really push myself to work hard at things I don't pick up naturally. My brother is the exact opposite. He struggled to learn early in his education and as a result he knows how to work and work and work at something he doesn't understand. Well, this programming language thing is something I do not understand quickly at all. I have to re-watch, rework and try try try again to figure even some of the most basic stuff in these tutorials. Reading about incremental theory put some of this into perspective for me. end note.
Conclusions
I suppose this week was a net gain in that I faced the wall and broke through it. If my past is any indication I will probably have several other pinch points where I'll feel inclined to quit. Maybe the balance struck between intrinsic/extrinsic motivation has taught me how to overcome my natural (or was it learned?) tendency to quit.
A final thought
This is how they extrinsically motivate you on the Code Academy website. They give you badges you can share on Facebook and Twitter! No, I chose to keep these prestigious accomplishments to myself and treasure them only in my heart.
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