Beginner’s Mind, Geek’s Mind

I have been away from this effort for some time. As noted in my last post, I have been working on some tutorials to get students through the basics of learning Dreamweaver. The development of those materials has proved interesting, and now that they have been developed, and delivered, I have been considering the activity involved and results achieved.

Perhaps the most striking thing I note about myself is the change from "not knowing" to "knowing." About a month ago I knew how to create a website, but not how to create a website in Dreamweaver. I found the program frustrating and counterintuitive. After working through the issue, and constructing (in my own definition of that word) the knowledge needed to build a website in Dreamweaver I slid into knowing how to do it. I chose the word "slid" carefully, because it seems to define how my brain moved as I changed states from un-knowledge to knowledge. One moment I couldn't do it, then I had a good idea of how to do it but had not yet practiced it, then a moment later it was just another thing I could do. I suspect learning is a little bit like pain in this way; we cannot remember it very well once it is past. The act of learning passes and what we are left with is the knowledge of the subject, while the knowledge of the process of learning slips away like a bump or scrape that has healed.

Since the learning is still fresh in my mind, I can still follow its construction. When I speak here of Beginner's mind it is not quite the same as the Zen idea of openness to possibilities, but rather, an understanding a beginner needs some basic guidance in the basics. Before one can expand a mental model, there must first be a mental model. Building that should be a first, and discrete, step. What was the most frustrating to me about all the tutorials I found was the noise. That is what I mean by Geek's mind, or what I perceived as the need to pile extraneous detail onto the basic mental model until in some cases I could no longer discern the basic mental model, just the noise. I am not sure why geeks do this, but if you have spent any time at all around them I'm sure you recognize the behavior. Perhaps it is just to show off, but in this case a lesson (or multiple lessons) on cascading style sheets degenerated into huge exercises of "do this, then do this, then do this…" until the initial reason for doing anything is long lost.

The problem is that it interferes with learning. This is why I created my minimalist instruction in Dreamweaver. Yes, a lesson on cascading style sheets can cover multiple instances of amazing formatting instructions to achieve almost anything, but THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO START! First create a mental model of a very basic CSS, and then build on it. Yes, templates can be used to create incredibly complex pages, but first, WHAT IS A TEMPLATE AND HOW DOES IT WORK IN DREAMWEAVER? How does the same menu get placed on all the pages and updated automatically? This seemingly simple idea was not part of any of the website tutorials I could find.

Because I could not find any, I took it onto myself to build some simple and easy to use tutorials that could be used to create simple mental models. What would have happened if my students did not have these models? How many would have duplicated my frustration, with the more devoted also finding a way to construct the needed knowledge from multiple different sources? This is not organized learning, it is chaos. What concerns me is the amount of chaos we accept. How many times in learning a basic program feature do we feel that "everyone else seems to know how to do this, why can't I?"

The most critical question for me is how to keep that feeling out of the e-learning that I create.

R