Multilitteratus Incognitus

A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins.  Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like.  While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both internal and external.  One of the potential issues with extrinsic motivators such as the various "goodies" that you get for checking into places†. While there wasn't a magic bullet (at least in the background research I did) for a good balance between internal and external motivators there was one huge warning: be very careful of external rewards for doing things. They slowly start to replace internal motivation that was there, and if you remove those external rewards, there is a danger of internal motivation not being there to sustain the learner.  This was somewhere in the back...

I've been a bit silent on mobiMOOC these past few days, mostly sitting back, reading and taking time to think about things. One of the ideas that has come to mind is using services like GoWalla and Foursquare to check-into locations and using this as some sort of mLearning platform. At UMass Boston the College of Management has a Management Achievement Program (MAP) . In this program undergraduates, in addition to their coursework in management, need to attend a series of lectures in order to graduate.  Students can mix and match the lectures that they attend (based on interests and availability) and accumulate enough "miles" in order to graduate. In the library we also have a self-guided tour of the library, and quite frequently I run into students who are doing scavenger hunts on campus as part of their  coursework.  It seems to me that these types of events could easily loan themselves to social-check ins.  For example If I am a management student and I elect t...