nosce te ipsum

Maybe it's a trend brought about by the internet (it is) but I'm noticing an increasingly great push towards openness, participation and transparency in all things.  Granted, i'm in the open source world so yes, of course I would see that everywhere :).  I'm increasingly driven by the idea of breaking down barriers to knowledge transfer both because of work in education and just my own moral compass.

I had 3 conversations this week, all of which went like this:

Asker: "Hey, I'd be really interested in talking to you about what I'm doing / ask you a question if it's ok"

Me: "Sounds great, wanna talk this week?"

Asker: "Oh...wow.. actually I didn't even think you'd respond, this is awesome ok!"

There seems to be this wall being built up around me as if I know what I'm talking about.  I am becoming a knowledge authority.  And this isn't said to toot my own horn, people that I'm talking to recently seem to have this mentality that I talk about what I do so I must know what I'm doing.  This has been my philosophy for replacing old authorities and becoming my own the last 3 years:

• Everyone is working on similar things in a certain field
• Not everyone is talking about it
• The difference between an expert speaking at a conference and me is that they are speaking

This is the new paradygm.  Are you speaking and do you have a voice?  Everyone is a knowledge expert in some field about something (see Connectivism).  And yes, you reading this right now.  You are an expert in something whether you realize it or not.  Something that I heard a few years ago that really triggered me being more vocal about what I do is (paraphrasing here): In the act of creating a product, another product is also created.

This is why I video blog and document everything.  I honestly don't feel like I'm doing anything that special, I'm just talking about it in a lot of ways.  There are 1000s of developers in the edutech space and 100s in the Drupal edutech space.  But the reason this invisible wall is being built up is because I'm participating in the community.

When I've posting things before about getting off the bench and into the game (Love the Joker from batman) this is what I'm talking about.  PARTICIPATE.  If you want to be the best at your field, start talking about where you are now.  It may seem silly, trust me, I felt really stupid being yelled at by the Drupal community for how terrible a programmer I was when I first jumped in, but when you reflect on a year or two year's worth of postings and work you see the big picture.  Yeah, living an open source life style is scary at first.  But when we break down the traditional barriers of what should be "kept to yourself" we start to learn a lot about ourselves and why we worried about "word getting out" at all.  In knowing yourself you can see the direction you're heading in as well as the direciton you can take the whole industry.

This isn't just the way I work anymore, it's the way I live.  Read this blog, read anything I've done in the last couple years and it'll start to make sense (I hope).  I don't view myself as an expert and will rarely claim to be.  I view myself a regular guy posting information to regular people.  We all know something about something, just tell people about it so they can better themselves and know something to.  Who knows, you might even learn a lot about yourself in the process.