The day before the latest attempt at the SKILSTAK Beginner Boost and my first attempt to create a series that helps others learn Go has me feeling ponderous and nostalgic for SKILSTAK.
I took a good hard look at myself this last week to see if I could identify what has tanked the Beginner Boost every year I have attempted it since the beginning. Even though people praise the attempts and gush gratitude for my help I always feel like something is off. I finally think I know why.
Look at these pictures a SKILSTAK game night.
https://instagram.com/p/Bisx1PkAgLT/?img_index=1
SKILSTAK was a vibrant community of individuals who regularly did things together in addition to learning. Sure the learning was a primary part of it, but there were equally important components of our learning community that served us all and ultimately made all the hard work and sacrifice to keep it going completely worth it. The energy was palpable. It was impossible not to stay motivated. It was also a lot easier than anything I’ve attempted with the online equivalents. Why? The answer to that question is the key to finally understanding what I think to make any online equivalent actually work.
To arrive at the answer I replayed memories of an average day at SKILSTAK. I would wake up and research different things, build educational systems like skilbot, and update the website and paperwork. I got to sharpen my skills, develop open source education content and software, and generally plug in to my own profession learning network.
When community members would start to come they would talk, joke, laugh, unwind from school, and sometimes eat their snacks. This camaraderie was rejuvenating and electric. Many didn’t have a lot of friends at their schools or jobs and formed friendships with those at SKILSTAK from all over the region. I let about 10 minutes of just socializing happen before we got going. Parents years later would say it was one of the biggest reasons they felt SKILSTAK had made such an impact on their children. Game nights were just a natural extension of this sociability.
Eventually, we’d quiet down and get started. A few times I had to get angry to actually to get them going. But when we finally did get going, it wasn’t hard. Beforehand, I only briefly thought about what would happen during the next 45 minutes. I didn’t need to. I asked the people there to learn what they wanted to learn. This always catches them off guard from the beginning.
I’ve learned from experience that there are two types of people personified by the question they would ask when they walked in the door:
It’s the distinction between these two types of attitudes that brings out the most important thing I—or any educator—can focus on helping a person learn—above all other skills and knowledge: the will and skill to learn.
This seems like a cop-out at first. It’s not. The ‘give a man a fish’ adage comes to mind. Most traditional education focuses on giving the student knowledge and skill rather than teaching them how to acquire knowledge and skill for themselves. It still surprises me how prominent Socrates and his methods are in the training of educators when no one seems to care to follow the most important thing he focused on: creating independent critical thinkers who took autodidactic control of their own organized learning. Schools seem completely disinterested in pursuing this approach. Perhaps because it is messy and unprofitable. After all, after someone has gained the will and skill to learn there is little need for “teachers” and entire academic institutions at all. The existential crisis of simply teaching students what the teachers themselves were taught about learning is too great for them to support. So they don’t. They throw money into football and esports teams to con students out of four years of their lives and livelihood.
Realizing all this has me convinced that I really only need to lazer-focus on helping those in my community learn that one Socratic imperative: learn to learn and chart their own way with confidence. This means all the specific about which language and editor and operating system are secondary at best. Once they know how to understand themselves and organize their learning toward their own goals I can just get out of the way and do my own learning next to them in parallel as a peer, which is exactly what I would do quietly enjoying learning time next to those I mentored at SKILSTAK.
I’ve realized that if I get really good at this, I can fit it into 90 minutes and repeat exactly the same thing every single week. The most important skill doesn’t take more than 90 minutes to talk about, but takes practice to perfect. So why not demonstrate what it takes once a week and leave the rest of everything I do in the community to answering questions and helping people practice this one specific skill.
This doesn’t mean we through out academics. It means that we encourage more mentoring by those who know and more courage for those learning to identify and reach out to those mentors, more learning by observing and allowing those learning to ask questions of those doing what they do. Livestreaming is actually ideal for this. This is something the Boy Scouts of America got really right. The entire system is designed to encourage this very thing.