More thoughts on Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age…

As I mentioned the last time, Shirky discusses in Chapter 2 the means by which people are now able to pool their cognitive surplus for the greater good. In Chapter 3, he focuses on what motivates people to contribute to these social initiatives. He draws on research by Deci, Benkler and Nissenbaum, and others to describe four common intrinsic motivations: the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share. I ended my last post by asking, “How do you tap into your students’ desires for autonomy, competence, connection, and sharing?” I’ll now share a couple of my answers to that question and offer a few additional thoughts on Chapter 3.

I’m in the thick of planning my fall course, a first-year writing seminar on the history and math of cryptography (codes and code breaking). This isn’t the first time I’ve taught this course, but it is the first time I’ve taught it as a first-year writing seminar. I’m taking a somewhat unusual approach to class participation this fall, one that (I think) leverages some of the intrinsic motivations discussed by Shirky. I’m giving my students three ways they can contribute to their class participation grade through out-of-class activities:

  1. Online Discussions – Each week we’ll have a reading or two from our textbook, Simon Singh’s The Code Book. (Yes, I’m very proud the course textbook goes for less than $11 on Amazon!) I’ll post a few open-ended questions about the reading to the course blog, like these. Students are encouraged to respond to these questions on the blog in the comments section. This is a version of the pre-class reading quiz I’ve blogged about over on ProfHacker.
  2. Social Bookmarking – Students are also encouraged to create accounts on Delicious and save to those accounts news articles, websites, and other online resources relevant to the course. I’m asking students to tag all their bookmarks using fywscrypto so that we’ll be able to find each others’ links very easily. In fact, I’ve embedded the RSS feed for that Delicious tag on the course blog.
  3. Collaborative Timeline – Inspired by the collaborative timelines put together by the students of Brian Croxall and Jason B. Jones, like this one on the Victorian Age, I’ll also give my students the chance to contribute to a class timeline on cryptography. Students will be able to enter events into a Google spreadsheet, adding dates, descriptions, images, and links for those events, and the back-end code will pipe those events into a nice online, interactive timeline. I searched around online last year for a “history of cryptography” timeline and couldn’t find a good one, so I hope we’ll end up with a nice resource by the end of the semester.

I’m telling my students that they need only contribute regularly to two of these three platforms to earn their full class participation grade. By giving them the choice how they want to contribute to the class (within some bounds), I’ll hopefully tap into their desire for autonomy. This approach worked well last fall when I let students choose (to some degree) between responding to pre-class reading questions and in-class clicker questions for class participation credit.

Since student contributions on all of these platforms will be public to the entire course, I’m hoping to tap into their desire to share. I’ll try to amplify that a bit by acknowledging good student work during class, quoting from student responses to pre-class reading quizzes occasionally and asking a student or two each class to share their latest Delicious bookmarks.

Finally, I’m hoping that these class participation mechanisms will give students the sense that they’re part of a learning community, that they can learn from each other perhaps as much as from me. This should tap into their desire for connectedness. And if they end up creating a really nice timeline of the history of cryptography that gets noticed and used by people outside the course (entirely possible since it will be on the open Web), the “We made that!” spirit should further increase their sense of connectedness.

We’ll see how this all works out. As I said, I haven’t taught this course as a first-year writing seminar before, so I’m not sure how well the freshmen will take to these activities. Each activity is intended to feed into other parts of the course (pre-class reading questions should feed into in-class discussions, Delicious bookmarks should give students ideas for their expository papers, and the timeline should be a useful resource for many of the final “Big Questions” papers), so hopefully none of this will feel like busywork.

This is a good time to recall a caution that Shirky provides:

“If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it… However, if you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt.”

What implications does this have for teaching? In my case, it means that I have to be willing to let the students go in unexpected directions as they participate in these various ways. I think this issue is at play when students think that an instructor just wants to hear his or her own opinion reflected back in essays they write. This usually isn’t the case, but students sometimes perceive it to be so—and disengage accordingly.

Similarly, I think there’s an element of this in the artificiality of writing papers and conducting projects that are only shared with one’s instructor. Were these assignments to be shared with someone other than one’s instructor, then they would be great opportunities for connecting and sharing. Since they’re only seen by the instructor, however, these social motivations don’t come into play—and students disengage accordingly. This is a good reason to open the doors of the classroom a little (figuratively) and share the good work that students are doing beyond those classroom walls.

To that end, I’ll be posting all of my students’ expository papers on the course blog around the middle of the semester and requiring them to comment on their peers’ work. Giving them more of a real audience (their peers, the open Web) should motivate them to take their work more seriously. Again, we’ll see.

I think that’s a wrap for Cognitive Surplus Chapter 3. Now it’s time to read Chapter 4, in which Shirky addressed the opportunities people have to engage in massively collaborative social projects.

Image: “Pipes” by Flickr user .:Axle:. / Creative Commons licensed