Why I Teach – Learning to Think Like the Web – #ccourses

I’ve been struggling to keep up with the torrent that is Connected Courses, a microcosm of my daily existence. I’ve been at this long enough now that I’m no longer surprised or upset to find myself out of sync. I prefer to treat falling out of sync as an opportunity for serendipity. Several weeks back, the question on the table was “Why I Teach”. As I’ve been mulling that over, the more recent conversation re-surfaced this post from Jon Udell:

Seven ways to think like the web | Jon Udell: 

Back in October, at the Traction Software users’ conference, I led a discussion on the theme of observable work in which we brainstormed a list of some principles that people apply when they work well together online. It’s the same list that emerges when I talk about computational thinking, or Fourth R principles, or thinking like the web. Here’s an edited version of the list we put up on the easel that day:

  1. Be the authoritative source for your own data 
  2. Pass by reference not by value 
  3. Know the difference between structured and unstructured data 
  4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions 
  5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope 
  6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber 
  7. Reuse components and services

I was at this conference and gave the keynote talk on observable work that Jon references and participated in the working session that generated this list. Which circles back to the fundamental reason that I teach. I teach to learn. To figure out my thinking by putting it out where it can be seen and critiqued. In the world of the Net that also means putting thinking out where it can connect. 

Online learning, connected courses, and knowledge work itself are still very much in the days analogous to the earliest days of movie making where the first movies were made by placing the camera in the audience of a stage play. We are all lab rats in this environment and will all learn by doing. We are all making it up as we go. One advantage that we may be able to exploit in connected learning as distinguished from connected working is that it is safer to acknowledge that we don’t know what we are talking about. It is always easier to learn if you can accept and lay claim to not knowing.