Mega-lightbulb!

You know when you don't really think you've been thinking about something, then someone else triggers you with a word or thought, then something else pops up that creates a whole stream of consciousness? Yeah. Well, that was me earlier!

I was so very glad that I'd been interviewing this evening as I had my voice recorder to hand, although I'm not sure about the rules for voice-recording and driving!

I shall try to organise what I taped into something people other than myself might understand. Here goes,

It all started whilst reading Blake's blog - Campus Session. In it she talks about 'presenting my artifact audio visually' and how being dyslexic this offers her an interesting solution (Curtis-Woodcock, 2013). This got me thinking, and commenting, about my own professional artifact and how I had, up until that point, been focusing on my potential audience in terms of their professional practice and not about their needs as individuals, i.e. the accessibility of my artifact.

OK. So that makes sense, right!

Then, on the way home from a student interview about 2 hours ago, I happened to tune in to an advert that was playing on my car radio (normally I just tune them out!). It was for the R.A.F. and the voice said something like "My name is ...... and my motivation to join the R.A.F. is..." This immediately made me think the following:

• audio, with text, would be accessible to more of my audience than words alone
• student voices, which I really want to include but have been struggling with how to maintain anonymity and confidentiality, could be 'heard', for example,

"My name is Holly and my motivation to come to dance lessons is that I like to keep fit and healthy"

(with names of flowers/ shrubs - like Holly, Fleur, Rose, Pink, etc - to protect anonymity and confidentiality)

• couple this with an animated graphic or the words popping up onto the screen and I could include a visual aspect to the artifact.
• lead on from these 'quotes' by talking (with graphics - words or images) about the teacher's need to understand what motivates, or doesn't motivate, students.

OK. So, is everyone still with me? I hope so. Last bit, I promise.

These two events have, through assimilation and verbal reasoning (into my voice recorder), lead me to another interesting discovery; my inquiry has two distinctive, but linked, aspects:

1. The discovery of the individual and uniquely combined motivations of my participants, and
2. How these combinations are uniquely affected by the events within the class, i.e. participant 1 is affected by event B more than event C due to her intrinsic/ extrinsic motivations W, Y and Z, whereas participant 2 is affected by event C but not B, and really affected by event D, due to her intrinsic/ extrinsic motivations X, Y and Z.

All of which (nearly there, I promised didn't I) gives me both a feeling of cohesion to my inquiry (improving student motivation) but also a need to represent it as two separate, although intrinsically linked, aspects (needing to understand your student before you can hope to motivate them effectively).

Phew! I think I might switch off for the rest of the evening now!

I'd really love you to comment about my ramblings though, particularly about if you think I'm,
a) talking nonsense,
b) making some sense but need to keep thinking, or
c) have a good idea that is worth developing!

S

References

Curtis-Woodcock, B. 2013. Campus Session. Blake's Blogs, [blog] 24th October 2013, Available at: http://blakecw92.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/campus-session.html [Accessed: 24 Oct 2013].