OUseful.Info, the blog…

Believe me, I know, Ouseful.info is generally all over the place, with occasional 2-3 week forays down very narrowly focussed (if you’re outside the area) rabbit holes…

And I know, I know, comments like: “you’re so productive it’s hard to keep up” do reoccur, which make me feel both good and bad.. because just STOP there for a minute…

…if you’re in full time HE studying how many hours a week, you’re expected to absorb how many new concepts and big ideas a week as part of your studies…?

…and I blog maybe 1-2 hours of study-time material a day (how many lecture hours a day does a full time student cope with)?

So where are we at? Folk do a degree to give them lifelong learning skills, and maybe get a grip on some power concepts/models that will help them keep making sense of the world after uni?

And to get the grades, they need to spend 20+ hours a week learning things new them that bore the hell out of their lecturers because it’s f***ing obvious to a PhD in the subject (but the students are A’level educated, not 3 years full time PhDing about arcana in the subject, remember…)

I spend maybe 20 hours a week trying to learn stuff, and maybe 10 hours a week blogging what I’ve learned or observed. The learning generally comes from me asking myself a question about how to do or build something, and then trying to figure out how to do it given: a) what I already know/have blogged about; b) what I think I need to search for given what I know I don’t know how to do.

Two things come to mind here: 1) I refer to my own blog posts a lot because: a) I typically don’t remember how to do something I’ve done before; but b) can generally remember if I’ve figured out how to do something before and blogged it; 2) I enjoy figuring things out for the first time for me…. Then I blog it as an offboard memory device. If I come across a new problem, I try to recall a related problem I’ve blogged a solution to, or I go to Stack Overflow.

So.. am I productive? What does that mean???? I think I’m on a daily learning journey, and I blog the result. Students are too… The only difference is, they’re following a path that is curriculum decided and known in advance to their instructor, and I;m making my journey up on an hourly basis.

Here’s a question I used to ask to wind up folk in my department: what did you learn how to do for the first time today? My day generally doesn’t start until I’ve come up with a problem and figured out how to solve it. Which is maybe why I’m not productive in a corporate/instituional sense at all…

Just sayin’…

NOTE: this blog post was written/posted at way past my bed time in my own time…so please bear in mind that maybe it’s the cider talkin’…;-)