Learning by Exposition
I have a lot of reasons to write. One of them is to improve my communication skills; other is because I enjoy it (weird, I know). At the same time, one of the reasons to do it is because it forces you to learn. Writing might be a good learning exercise by itself, as I mentioned previously in my blog. However, what pushes you to test your knowledge is to try to make sense of what you are absorbing. It might sound contrarian, even irresponsible, but there is no better way to assess your knowledge that when you try to teach it. Like the famous quote says:
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Some boy
So teaching makes us more conscious of what we know and what we do not know. The main possible challenge trying to execute this “learning by teaching” might be that you do not know any six-year-olds, or anybody willing to learn under your terms. However, there is a place where there are no six-year-olds, but most people behave like one: The internet.
There are multiple formats and an insane amount of platforms on the internet to publish yourself: videos, podcasts, live streaming, blogs, etcetera. Yet, exposing yourself to the internet is a harsh experience because you’re running against the numbers. You will find a lot of people smarter than you, and a lot of people that will like to take you down. Publishing what you think you know on the internet might not have the same level of responsibility as with middle childhood education. But be aware, it will be more caustic.
What if instead of re-examining your learnings to teach an oblivious person, you publish what you have learned directly on the internet, open to an audience of both uninformed and experts. I like to call this “learning by exposition.”
There is an approach called “learning by exposure,” in which the person learning gets a taste of how things are done directly by the experts. However, in “learning by exposition,” you take the role of the expert, and the exposition is not from others but from you to others. It is designed mostly to cement yourself into the “conscious competence” area, to leave the “conscious incompetence” ghost behind once and for all, and to set the main building blocks into “unconscious competence.”
Not only can most learning experiences benefit from this type of exposition, but it is also a matter of getting a taste of the inevitable. All the things that we learn are going to get eventually “tested” by the real world, so why not to do it as early and granular as possible? In this day and age of pseudo-autodidacts* and learning-by-youtube, it is easy to avoid feedback and get trapped in eco-chambers.
*I call it pseudo because for me being an autodidact is learning by experimenting or trial-and-error. Not reading a book, watching a video, or following a tutorial that somebody created with the explicit objective of teaching somebody like you.
Here are some things to have in mind when considering this approach:
You are the expert now
You might not have the pretension of posing as an expert. However, with the inherent dryness of digital communications, everything you share might be taken as if you want to.
The challenge is to be granular enough to be able to understand something with certitude while avoiding the rabbit holes of precise knowledge. When you are learning, it is common to realize that everything is filled with exceptions and asterisks leading to footnotes that lead to other texts, and that ad infinitum. You should not try to bite more than you can chew, you don’t want to get overwhelmed or fall hard into the “valley of despair” of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Make a promise
If you want to play the game in hard-mode, you can publicly commit to a one-time delivery date or a periodical output. You might have heard that it is terrible to tell everybody about your plans because they will fail, and I agree with that. Though you are not promising over what you want to achieve, only what you want to share, and it might be a great tool to help you focus on what is relevant.
I do not see these exercises as parts of a gradual approach, but they can be periodical. You are supposed to expose yourself every time, prove how well you are consolidating the knowledge you are acquiring. Each delivery should be self-sufficient. The purpose of this activity is not to create habits or to display a picture of progress for your audience. If you fail to meet a deadline, double-down on your promise. Don’t normalize the failure to deliver. Keep the pressure on!
Profit
Once you have shared your knowledge with the world, the best outcome you can expect is people giving you feedback. I read somewhere that receiving feedback is like getting free money because it is people letting you know how you can be better. This might be considered naive because we all are well aware of how toxic some corners of the internet might be.
Nevertheless, that is the whole benefit of creating educational content for the web. If you’re teaching somebody offline, you will try to find holes in your knowledge. Yet, if something escapes you, you and your student will be equally unaware. The internet will burst that bubble and will let you know what you are missing. The challenge is to identify good criticism from toxicity.
Know your audience
It is worth to mention that you do not need to plan for an actual six-year-old. This whole methodology might start as a self-centred attempt to improve yourself, but it should be empathetic and unselfish. If you do not think first how your piece might help another person, you will fail in every objective of the exercise.
It should be natural to feel empathetic with a novice audience because we all went through that phase. How can you help the clueless person you were before you started learning? Did you find a new angle or uncover hidden clues that might help somebody like your past-self?
If you think something is too obvious to be said. The worst scenario is that someone will spend a few extra seconds reading about something expected. The best case is that it will be a revelation for somebody else. Remember the “Daily lucky 10,000” from xkcd and think about how it might be possible for somebody learning.
How does this look?
YouTube might be the best place to find successful cases for this approach. I can recognize different content creators that want to share their knowledge online. They kept mastering their craft in front of their audience. Like I said before, it is never meant to show progress, but it is self-evident in most cases, thanks to the access to the archive of old videos.
And more apparent, my blog. Initially, my content is designed to improve my writing. Now that I’m getting more grey hairs on my beard and people are asking me for my advice more often, I enjoy testing my ideas and seeing if they make sense or if I should stop bolstering them.
I do not think I can get any more meta than this.
If you like film Hollywood film franchises, this article among “Thou shall take notes” and “Sketchy reasons to sketch” might be considered my trilogy of dubious advice on learning.
