Hello world!

I am so excited to be diving into my first EDCI class with you all. My name is Eleonora Stoynova, and I am a Health Information Science student here at the University of Victoria. I am taking this elective to gain some new perspective on learning modalities and hope to apply the knowledge and experiences I gain throughout this course in my future academic and professional pursuits.

Many of the social spaces used in this course are new to me (ex. Mattermost) but thankfully the set up instructions provided were straight forward. Setting up my blog for the first time was a bit tricky but as many of you might have experienced, that was largely due to the changes OpenETC underwent prior to the start of this course. Now that those issues have resolved themselves, I am ready to hit the ground running and jump into everything EDCI 339: Open and Distributed Learning has to offer.

While I am mostly stepping into this course blind, I am eager to learn about the different methods of teaching and some of the psychology behind different learning styles and capabilities. As such, my Learning Pod Pair Partner, Mandy Song, and I will be exploring the topic “The Psychology of Motivation: how do intrinsic and extrinsic factors shape lifelong learning?” for our free inquiry assignment. This topic aligns with both our interests, and we are excited to see where our research and discussions take us.

Week 1 Reading Reflection

Of the three readings posted for this week, I found the video How Distance Changes Everything, the most intriguing. I believe I favour this one above all because I found that it challenges the way I think about learning and provides a new perspective for me to consider.

Pursing a Bachelor of Science, I am used to a very traditional approach to education where I attend lectures and then get tested on the material. It seems like my education journey is majorly reflective of the thinking in the early days of how universities came to be, as described by Jon Dron. I am used to learning in an environment where teachers are in full control that when I find myself in a place where that is not the case, I quite frankly feel lost.

I believe this also plays into the point where extrinsic motivation takes away from the joy of the journey and when you take it away, intrinsic motivation doesn’t come back. While this is my first time hearing this statement, it resonated with me immediately. Oftentimes I find myself wondering why I am interested in learning something new, for example a new language, but never end up doing so. I can now assume that is because there is no reward to doing that. Sure, one can argue that the award is the ability to converse with a larger group of people, or a number of other things, however that is not something that explicitly proves my level competency. As such, I am not interested in learning.

Keeping this in mind, I was very intrigued by the diagram Jon Dron presented for fostering intrinsic motivation in the classroom setting.

(How Distance Changes Everything, diagram presented by Jon Dron and first seen in the presentation at 14:42)

As I am used to being extrinsically motivated in the classroom, I struggle with seeing how being intrinsically motivated in the areas of competence, autonomy, and relatedness will provide me with any more benefit than how I am already motivating myself. This, however, is likely a bias that I have developed over time for extrinsic motivation.  As such, especially after seeing Jon Dron’s diagram for fostering intrinsic motivation in the online environment, I am committing myself to giving this new perspective to learning an honest try.

(How Distance Changes Everything, diagram presented by Jon Dron and first seen in the presentation at 18:21)

While this shift of mindset will likely be difficult for me to comprehend at first, throughout EDCI 339 I am determined to motivate myself intrinsically so that I can develop a love for the learning journey. I enjoy stepping outside of my comfort zone and this is a perfect opportunity for me to begin doing so.