Marco and Linus
I went to a talk by Marco Torres yesterday, and I went in slightly skeptical about the whole thing, since I had heard people rave about him, but even mindful that I had encountered people who others had raved about and found next to useless. Initially, I was going to to put him that same category as I found that he was of a similar vein in some ways. If I had left at the interval (2 hours + 20 mins + 1.5 hours), I would have left disappointed in a lot of ways, since in some ways I found it to be stuff I already knew, or didn’t appeal to me since it was a Mac based demo of how to do things. There where some things I enjoyed about this and I saw one piece of software used in way that I hadn’t seen it use before and it was something that I will use again, but for the most part, I didn’t get into it at all.
However, in the second part, it made more sense to me, and he built on the first part, which just spoke to me more, and is partly why I am back doing this. He talked about his personal learning network, and the people who help him learn what he needed to learn. It was this peer to peer learning between teachers where people are willing to open their classroom to other teachers which I found helped me out so much since I have started teaching, rather than this formal learning that seems to be the old standard. It is what we are encouraging in our kids, so why not in our schools and between schools, and the first part of his demonstration made perfect sense in this light, since he was using another teacher as part of his presentation and learning.
That other thing that I was impressed with was that rather than everyone having to know everything, but that the role of the teacher should be equivalent to a movie producer. You might not know how to do everything, but you can find someone who can do the work for you. It reminded me of a quote from Linus Torvalds in The Cathedral and The Bazaar,
“I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.”
Now this is necessary for everything, but why not let the person who knows what they are doing do all the work and let you do the things you are good at. It makes sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to to others, and it just makes another prominent author a little out of sync with his readers, but more on that at another time.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s03.html