In his opening keynote at Blackboard World yesterday, Steve Wozniak reflected on his experiences growing up at the dawn of the modern computer era. Along the way, he made several references to the intrinsic motivations that drove him to do the things he did. Some examples:

• When he bumped into a new technology, he was instantly driven to figure out how it worked. Not only that, he instantly began working on a way to replicate the technology “using fewer parts”. The intrinsic desire (need?) to know how things work drove him to creatively figure things out, often to the extent of reverse-engineering them.
• He would often go to school, or work, or even sneak into a lab after hours and work all night to solve a challenging problem.
• His first job was with HP. He intended to stay there forever because he wanted to be an engineer. He only left (to start Apple with Steve Jobs) because he was convinced he could remain and engineer and not become a manager.
• After leaving Apple, he became a volunteer technology teacher to help students have the same kinds of experiences he did when he was younger.

His talk was a stream-of-consciousness flow of thoughts, ideas, and recollections. As such, it provided perhaps a more intimate window into his psyche than a carefully constructed speech might have. While emphasizing these sorts of intrinsic motives, he also dropped occasional references to the praise, support, and encouragement he received from his teachers, parents, peers and bosses. In each case, he noted that the praise motivated him to be even more creative the next time he worked on something.

The lesson? Learners learn and create because they want to. If they don’t want to, our efforts to make them learn will largely be in vain. Consequently, teachers and learning technologists need to (as Roger Schank has argued) create the conditions for successful learning by tapping into intrinsic motives, allowing them to essentially take over and drive student learning. That’s when great things happen.