

Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning - dugsong
http://vimeo.com/5513063

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pj
He says _sharing knowledge isn't like sharing a cheeseburger, there's no
reason to be selfish with knowledge_

But, unfortunately, he is wrong on that point. He is wrong, because there _is_
a reason to be selfish with knowledge. If you are selfish with knowledge, then
you are creating a scarcity for _your_ knowledge. If your knowledge is more
scarce, then _you_ are more valuable and, in our _f-ed_ up society, that means
you're gonna get more money to do whatever it is you do.

I don't like this. I loathe this, but that doesn't make it untrue. It is true
and it is crap. We need to give people more incentive to share knowledge than
they have incentives to _hoard_ knowledge. Most people don't get paid to share
knowledge. They get paid to implement solutions _based_ on the knowledge they
have and _others_ don't.

Until this sad fact changes, people will continue to hoard knowledge. It ruins
organizations all over the planet. Jimmy Bob is the only one who can solve the
problem so Jimmy Bob always has a job. If Jimmy Bob taught Bobby Sue how to do
the job, then Jimmy Bob would be fired because he costs twice as much as Bobby
Sue...

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alanthonyc
I understand where you're coming from with this opinion, but I strongly
disagree.

My disagreement comes from years of personal experience with exactly this
situation. I'm an ERP consultant and work in places where the entrenched
workers have the habit of holding information of how their systems run close
to the vest. They seem to think that this enhances their job security.
However, they are instead often simply viewed as "necessary evils."

I've come to the realization that every time I share my knowledge with as many
people as possible, in as straightforward manner as possible, my value to the
organization for which I'm working increases.

Now, I look at my job as one where I am literally finding ways to _put myself
out of a job_. In other words: find efficiencies in the business processes I
work with that will remove the need for manual (i.e. my) intervention.
Ironically, the more I do this, the more work seems to fall on my lap.

I firmly believe that knowledge is not at all like a cheeseburger.

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diN0bot
school does suck. or rather, is does most of the time. i think outside of
school also sucks most of the time.

what i mean is, those rare instances of mentoring, nurturing, collaboration,
sharing--those can happen anywhere. maybe they tend to happen outside of
school more often. i don't know.

but many times, people view each other as being on opposing teams. competition
is great--i love being motivated by a sweet prize, pushing myself towards some
awesome goal--but false competition, in which people strive to one-up each
other needlessly, hoarding knowledge and putting others down to lift
themselves up, really sucks. we can accomplish a lot more together by helping
each other out.

i was hoping it would be a presentation on the culture of "we're all learning
and getting better" in open source and beyond. nonetheless, this is a
reasonable angle; change comes on multiple fronts.

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peregrine
This guy nailed it right on the head.

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Locke1689
OK - admit it. How many of you guys are Northwestern students too?

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zacharypinter
Good video, though his voice sounds like a computer synthesizer.

~~~
iamwil
It wasn't until the end of the video did I realize that I met Dr. Tae. But
back then, he was just "Tae", a physics grad student at U of I that introduced
himself as "Tea, but with the last two letters transposed"

He's actually quite animated in person, and I remember his physics section was
rather fun.

