What Do We Know, Really?
We don’t know as much as we think we do. It’s important to test our knowledge, find holes in what we think we know, and share what we know with others. To do that, we must test what we know by doing. Through actively working with our knowledge, we can discover limits to what we know. Once we find a limit, we must identify what we need to learn in order to pick up the missing pieces. After picking up the pieces and contextualizing that knowledge, we can share what we have learned.
This site is about the technologies that I use and interests that I have. I hope that what I share will be made useful to you with purposeful practice.
This is the easy part. Well, it would be if all of the knowledge that we were seeking were available. Availability doesn’t just mean accessible, it means being obvious that it is useful from the outside, and explicit enough that it can actually be useful to us where we are as learners.
Well, I guess there is another reason why it isn’t easy. It must be reinforced. The average person doesn’t just read something and understand it, and they also can’t just read it and know it. If the thing that we are learning is not obvious, then it means we must play with it, test it out, and see what it is through practice.
For me, this is the hardest thing. How much more comfortable it is to be an armchair <noun>. That noun can be
anything. Armchair cook. Armchair painter. Armchair programmer. Been there. Done that. One thing that I have learned
is that knowing and doing reinforce one another. If you have all of the theory, but none of the practice, than you
can’t offer context to adapt that knowledge in practical situations.
I love to do this: If I hear some quirky fact that intrigues me, then I want others to know it, too. This comes from wanting other people to experience the joy that I felt when I learned something interesting. It also comes from wanting to seem intelligent, too. I am learning to downplay these motivators more and more. Trivia is a bit frivalous. It seems like knowledge, but it doesn’t help us excel in the day to day tasks we have to perform.
Sharing trivia is not the same as sharing skills, tricks, or techniques learned through practice. These things can have a real impact on someone’s life. They also must be accessible. Communicating information in such a way that another person can understand and apply that information is a skill. So, let’s make the information that we share count. Let it be useful.