Is Learning Fun? I Don't Think So.

I used to think that learning was fun. I decided today that learning isn't fun. Knowing things is fun. If you want people to learn things you need to either make them easy to learn or convince them that their lives will be much better if they have learned the stuff.

I'm editing a paper about some surveys that were designed to see what people like about their hobbies. The idea is that a key part of something being a hobby is that you are trying to learn about it rather than it just be something that you do in your free time. For example, lots of people drink beer in their free time, but most of them don't consider it a hobby. For those who are learning to be certified beer judges, however, drinking beer is a hobby.

One set of questions on this survey was based on the assumption that learning is fun. Dewey, for example, said that learning was fun, but that schools managed to suck the fun right out of learning. Today I think that learning is not fun. Learning is hard. What is fun is knowing something.

My dissertation study sort of showed this. I had kids rate how fun their current activity was. Those who were doing the most engaging activity didn't have a higher average rating of their engaging, but there was a larger spread. Sometimes they were really frustrated, other times they were really happy. I think the explanation is that learning hard and frustrating, but once they figured out how to solve the problem, they were quite happy with themselves. The trick, then, is to convince kids that the work they'll need to put in to learning whatever it is will be worth the effort.

This is essentially the point of The Change Function. Coburn said that the likelihood that a technology will be adopted is a function of the "perceived crisis" and the "total perceived pain of adoption." If a technology is to be successful, it needs to either solve a really big problem or be really easy to learn to use. So it is with learning.

If you want anyone to go through the pain of learning something, you'd better figure out how to make it really easy to learn (which seems really hard) or convince them that this knowledge will solve some crisis. Too often, I think, the "crisis" is grades. Since I never cared about grades, I think it's a better bet to find other ways to generate the crisis.