[quoting Chakrabarti, 4 Dec 98.a] Can extrinsic motivation help in learning when there is no intrinsic motivation?
I am not suggesting that extrinsic motivation is better than intrinsic motivation. I am suggesting that extrinsic features can help to draw people into an environment they might not otherwise be interested in, or hold their interests after their question has been answered, but some outside force, such as curricular goals, dictates they are not yet done. So, I think the answer is yes. I think that extrinsic motivational features can help get people ,interested in the problem at hand.
There are times when that problem may not have any particular relevance to somebody, but how the problem is presented may determine whether or not people will attend to it.
It's hard for me to imagine a person who hates guns being engaged in playing Doom.
For me it is not that hard. I am not a big fan of guns, but I can enjoy playing Doom or other similar types of games. I am not, to the best of my knowledge, acting out personal fantasies. The issue, from the perspective of my work, is one of the environment itself being engaging to me. The first time I played Doom, I had no idea what the problem was (the same goes for Myst). However, the environments themselves can provide my initial interest in the environment while I figure out what the problem is and whether or not it is of interest to me.
Doesn't extrinsic motivation ride on existing intrinsic motivation?
I don't think so, but I might defer to Clark for a discussion on that one. What I am suggesting here is that the environment can help foster/nurture a learner's interest in the problem at hand. while they decide if they are interested.
If significant learning takes place purely as a result of extrinsic motivation, what is the nature of that learning? For example, if I am not interested in learning about city planning, what do I learn when I play SimCity?
I think you learn about City Planning. I don't know whether or not you will become a City Planner, but you certainly learn something about where to place fire stations relative to housing developments. You may be talking about incidental learning here, whether or not there are things we learn by accident. But there have certainly been a lot of people who have played SimCity for very long periods of time that have had no interest in being city planners. Surely I suppose there are other kinds of learning taking place, but in terms of content, it is likely about city planning.