Tacit vs. Explicit

I can remember, way back in my Toronto days, discussing tacit knowledge. That's the knowledge that is NOT part of the official documentation, but still useful. As you might guess, historians of technology are concerned about this sort of thing because if you study past technologies, and all you have is the official documents, you might come up short when it's time to make things work.

The estimate that I can remember is that tacit knowledge is something like 80% of the total. That's right, the official instructions are usually about a fifth of what a skilled worker knows.
I take two lessons from this.


1) Document what you're doing. Spend the time to make the labels for the folders, and file documents where they belong, etc. The next person will thank you.

2) Share all of those little tricks that you learn. Case in point: If an entire class makes blogs, and they're all on the same wireless router, then Google will interpret that as a spam attack and shut down your access to blogger.

Frustrating, because I tested this exact same thing, and from my office, it works flawlessly every time.
Therefore, make a blog has to be a HW assignment, done at the students' convenience. If I've got time, I'll demonstrate it to them. Won't work any other way.

Here we go...

Not only am I going to be writing the occasional blog post, but I'll be teaching my students to do the same. It won't be boring, that's for sure.

My prediction is that blogger will make the Blackboard discussion board look like a waste of time. What I don't know is how the students will take to blogging. Yes, yes, digital generation and all that, but most of them have only a passing familiarity with digital technology. They can download apps, but certainly wouldn't know how to write one.