Expertise

Yes, this is me. Cindy was fooling around with the camera feature on the new iPad2 and came up with this image. The quality of the image or of the subject of the image is not the issue here, but the fact that Cindy was exploring some new feature of the iPad is. Just a few seconds of experimentation and then it was on to something else.

I have watched Cindy interact with many educators over the years. When the interaction involves technology, the reaction to the interaction often results in a question. The question originates from random people who come up to her in some random coffee house and from academics most would regard as the elites in the ed tech field (we just returned from AERA and I heard the question asked several times). The question is some version of “How do you know all of this stuff?”

One of the topics I cover in my graduate ed psych course is “the nature of expertise”. You may have heard of the 10000 hour rule. From chess experts to cigar rollers, it appears that skill increases over an incredibly long period of time and 10000 hours is a useful standard for what it takes to acquire expertise. So, I am thinking many experts have actually not spent that much time with technology or teaching with technology. More and more, the individuals we too often consider experts spend most of their time talking about what they know rather than actually developing expertise. They tend to have a few “go to” concepts and a few favorite examples, but what they often cannot do well is generalize to the circumstances of another. You might call it transfer. This is what really impresses people – it is not the capacity to use your own world as the source of illustrations, it is the capacity to quickly understand someone else’s situation and show what is possible given those circumstances.

So, expertise is not for the faint of heart. You don’t acquire it by reading a few books, visiting a few classrooms, or even thinking deep and profound thoughts. It takes a life time in combination with focus and an active mind. This is kind of the interesting thing in considering the notion of the digital native – the combination of experience and knowledge is just not there. I have watched this phenomenon evolve over 20 years in my wife. Playing with this and that device and learning the features of this or that program – hour after hour after hour. This is just the beginning. Somehow, the technical skills seem cataloged against an awareness of forty years of classroom scenarios, the constant identification of “you could use this to do that” connections, and the capacity to search this mental database on command starting from either a device, application, or scenario.

So, what I have just described is how it is done. The question for any would be expert is whether you are willing to do it.