{"id":65,"date":"2012-08-19T04:02:51","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T09:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/?p=65"},"modified":"2014-06-02T12:36:56","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T17:36:56","slug":"knowledge-is-a-commodity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/19\/knowledge-is-a-commodity\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge is a Commodity"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I started thinking about how to explain what brought me to the conclusion that knowledge is a commodity and how LRNGO.com<\/a> was going to implement a platform for this, and I realized that it has actually been a common theme throughout my life.\u00a0 Of course, the purpose of this blog is not to bore you with my life story, but\u2026well, too bad I\u2019m going to bore you with my life story. \u00a0\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

It all started with music. Like a lot of kids, I gravitated towards what I was good at.\u00a0 In my case, when I was growing up and heard songs I liked on the radio, I could usually play & sing them by hearing them.\u00a0 It was just something I did and enjoyed without very much difficulty.\u00a0 When I \u201clearned,\u201d it was because I was either learning through private instruction, or performing with others who were older and better than me.\u00a0 Research was practicing, learning from an instructor was training, but playing for and with others actually \u201cdoing it\u201d was social and learning at the same time.\u00a0 That\u2019s what provided the benchmarks, as well as the impetus for me to research and train harder.<\/p>\n

This early experience eventually led me to write a thesis called \u201cAll the World is a Stage: the Dynamics of One on One Training vs Group Immersion.\u201d\u00a0 The idea is that you train more intensely one on one so you can interact at a higher level when you are in a social group, and the larger the group (or \u201cstage\u201d so to speak – expandable up to the whole world), the more competition, and therefore the more intensely you train.\u00a0 I hypothesized that one could apply this to all forms of learning; everything from the Olympics to languages (ie: if you are in France, you will not only learn French quicker because you are there \u201cdoing it,\u201d but also because you will try harder to learn when you are training).<\/p>\n

Whether or not the idea that effort or assimilation is directly proportionate to competition and size of a group is flawed, what I found interesting was the extent to which these dynamics feed off of each other and how they are inter-related, and the percentages of learning that take place in social group or immersion settings vs one on one training vs research\/practice.\u00a0 At the time though, I didn\u2019t acknowledge the extent to which one on one learning is also social–which brings me back to\u2026that\u2019s right, my boring life story. \u00a0\ud83d\ude42\u00a0 (Stay with me here, it will all make sense.)<\/p>\n

I earned money to go to college by gigging in professional bands the summer before and the summer after my first year of college.\u00a0 Without getting into how much I learned performing vs how much I learned in school (almost equal but very different), at that time, I chose to continue to play professionally rather than complete my degree.\u00a0 However, a few years later as a professional, I found myself having to compete with better players on larger stages, and felt like I would have also greatly benefited from a strong university program.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the choices at that point weren\u2019t good for a working musician.\u00a0 To stop working full-time and go into debt for school was not a viable option on a musician\u2019s salary.<\/p>\n

Looking back now, the situation reminds me of a story I heard.\u00a0 There was this guy who wanted to go to MIT (skip ahead if you\u2019ve heard this one before) but couldn\u2019t get in and didn\u2019t have the money.\u00a0 He borrowed a small amount to attend a nearby Art Institute and learned how to create a very realistic school ID.\u00a0 He used his skills to manufacture one for MIT and attended their classes, and although he never got credentials on paper, once he started working in the real world no one cared.\u00a0 He took his studies seriously, and became a good enough software engineer that he always had work.\u00a0 He had no money, learned, and ultimately beat the system.\u00a0 (I wouldn\u2019t have tried this myself, because with my luck I would have just ended up in the slammer owing a lot of money to MIT!)<\/p>\n

So I didn\u2019t plan anything near as devious, but I did contact the professor at my target university who was the head of the department directly.\u00a0 I explained the situation to see if he would teach me privately, and he did. \u00a0I learned the curriculum directly from him (a credit to both his goodwill and teaching ability), and reaped the benefits in less than one third the time at a small fraction of the cost.\u00a0 What I didn\u2019t realize at the time, was that I had also accidentally learned how to teach the curriculum that he taught me.\u00a0 I found this out later, and then began teaching what I knew to others through private lessons.<\/p>\n

From that experience, the questions eventually started pouring into my head.\u00a0 How closely are learning something and learning how to teach it related?\u00a0 Was it just me, or can anyone transfer one to the other? (Still an ongoing question BTW.)\u00a0 If I learn \u201chow to teach\u201d, can I then teach anything I learn?\u00a0 For me it stood to reason the answer was yes, but I wanted to find out.\u00a0 I did, and eventually became a full-time instructor.<\/p>\n

At one point I may have gone a bit far in my experiments, and I began teaching in classrooms when I had little (ok no) credentials for this. \u00a0I did know the subject, but had no classroom experience or training, so I decided to do some preliminary consulting with the best classroom teachers I could find to learn a thing or two before going in. \u00a0After a couple weeks, I quickly found a job where they had been through three teachers in the past 18 months (it turned out none of them could keep the class engaged – baptism by fire!), and I just started \u201cdoing it.\u201d\u00a0 Sure I made mistakes in the beginning, but I made sure to document everything and keep track of what was working and why.\u00a0 In the end, I turned out to be the first teacher for that subject and in that school location they had ever considered successful, and I continued at the school for two years.<\/p>\n

As another side note (can I do that?\u00a0 Where is the blog handbook\u2026): I have to say IMHO other than knowing the subject matter, a short stint in comedy turned out to be the best training possible for me as an uninitiated teacher going into a first time classroom setting.\u00a0 Not to entertain or even to keep attention of the class, but because it constantly makes one hyper-sensitive to gauging audience reaction and instantly knowing if they are \u201cwith you\u201d and \u201cgetting\u201d what you\u2019re saying.\u00a0 In comedy, if the audience doesn\u2019t understand or \u201cget\u201d something, seconds seem like hours, so you learn to redirect them and communicate very quickly in a different way that makes you understood or else you \u201cdie.\u201d\u00a0 If I had one bit of out of the box thinking advice to universities, I would encourage experimenting with limited standup comedy training in education curriculums and then measuring results.\u00a0 (I\u2019d be very interested to know if anyone is actually out there doing that!)<\/p>\n

Anyway, all that is to say, my own private instruction experiences ultimately weren\u2019t just social because I was interacting with another person when learning, but because there was also a paying it forward aspect from teaching others in turn.<\/p>\n

And so it went: from martial arts to business accounting to running a record label, I always felt like given time and money limitations, I got more bang for my buck by just doing things and paying an expert of my choosing to teach me how.\u00a0 This, in turn, also helped the individual instructor to supplement their income at a time and location that was convenient for them, and eventually enabled me to pass on to others what I had learned in the new role of instructor.\u00a0 No, it shouldn\u2019t be the only way\u2014but it should be a choice everyone has\u2014whether used to supplement their classroom experience, or to learn a new skill on the side.\u00a0 It is the future, and the future of education will be about choices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I started thinking about how to explain what brought me to the conclusion that knowledge is a commodity and how LRNGO.com was going to implement a platform for this, and I realized that it has actually been a common theme throughout my life.\u00a0 Of course, the purpose of this blog is not to bore…<\/p>\n

<\/span> Continue reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[142],"tags":[116,141],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":542,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lrngo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}