I think a lot about expertise. This is an important topic in education and hence an interest of most educational psychologists. There are many types of expertise. These thoughts concern the form of expertise involved in helping others accomplish their goals. This can be somewhat different than what most educators do – we help others understand what we want them to understand.
My wife has supported teachers and professors most of her career. She helps others help their students do meaningful things with technology. She has this very interesting capacity to accept a request regarding a specific curriculum goal and then offer options involving various combinations of activity and software/hardware. It is the variety I find impressive. Not a one trick pony way of viewing the world or a dependence on abstract suggestions that leave the details to the educators. Options with the capacity to demonstrate each idea.
Expertise is different than knowledge and most have heard of the 10,000 hour principle. It takes a lot of time and a lot of examples to acquire expertise. I have watched this happen over the last 15 years or so. It is hard to explain just what this takes. Here are a couple of attempts.
Cindy has two iPads. This is not because she always needs the newest and greatest. It is because her first iPad was full of apps and she needed a second one to expand her collection. There is this constant process of exploring – download and experiment. Night after night.
A few weeks ago my daughter asked Cindy to help her prepare some “crafts” that could be sold to support a collaboration with a cancer treatment center for young people in a South American (I can’t recall the country so you can see how well I follow these “projects’). Anyway, the “hummingbird” is the symbol used by this organization and so the idea was to collect crafts focused on a hummingbird theme. These situations are an opportunity for Cindy to explore. Our daughter made some cards with a hummingbird picture (I did contribute by taking the pics). One design – one option. That is what she had time to do. Cindy purchased a new printer, a laminator, 4 cartridges for our color laser (these are not cheap) and began making things. When things do not work like she expects, there is the chance to figure things out. Sometimes you can print to the edge of a document and sometimes not (this is called bleed – as in full bleed). Half a day trying to get a nonresponsive app to generate a full bleed product.
Now she has some new ideas for projects. Now she understands more about the processes involved in generating and printing in unusual formats. This is what it takes.