Learning, Teaching, & Thinking In Public

Many of us do our thinking in public. We build digital gardens, write articles, blog posts, sometimes entire books that put our thoughts on the page and those pages out into the world. This process is nothing new: people like Richard Feynman popularized these ideas decades ago. When Feynman said “You have to work on paper and this is the paper”, he was ensuring people understood that the thinking actually happens on the page.

The Trail & The Garden

When you think on the page, there’s no escaping your own thoughts. They are right there for you to reference and reflect on, unchanged by the fuzziness of your own memory. These thoughts leave a trail. When we think in our minds or out loud, the thoughts are gone the moment they are uttered, which means that only when someone is in the room with us can they benefit from the winding path our thinking took. That path, if recorded, is a trail for others to follow.

Those of us who feel most comfortable doing our thinking on the page usually wind up writing enough to call ourselves authors. As such, we want to respect our readers time so we reinforce the path that we took, cutting away brush, building sturdy bridges, placing clear sign posts, and removing trail markers to dead ends to keep our readers focused on the main path. There is a great deal of research that happens behind the scenes with more dead ends than we're usually comfortable sharing. We include some in the final output, but usually reconstructed to fit neatly within the larger narrative that we weave. What doesn't fit neatly within the main body of writing is shoved off into footnotes and notes sections.

While creating this curated trail is useful, the dead ends detailed are of equal use. These help people understand that our thinking path wasn’t a direct one, that even the most knowledgeable of people stumble. The dead ends help others who find themselves in the same place find their way back to the main trail.

When we do this, we think on the page and we write in public, but we do not learn in public.

This is unfortunate, because while many will benefit from our writing in public, those who find themselves stuck at dead ends won't benefit from the work we did to get back to the main path. Additionally our most supportive readers would rather be along for the journey with us. They want to see the rough edges of our thoughts, the places where we get stuck. They want to see how we slowly backtrack to the place where we took a wrong turn and figure out what the next steps forward are. Many of them would also like to help, in a respectful way, with input and suggestions. Sometimes we write-to-thinkers enjoy the input of others, but other times we would rather puzzle away at the problem in solitude. Perhaps because we see something that we are having difficulty articulating. Perhaps we think it’s worth it to spend more time investigating if this path we’re on leads somewhere and we’d like to prove to ourselves that it is a dead end before backtracking and finding a new path forward.¹

So we do our learning in private, where we can protect ourselves from the influence, both positive and negative, of those around us.

None of this precludes learning in public, however. Because the issue is not that we gave the world our learning on the page, but instead that we did not wish to solicit feedback from others. We shouldn’t hide away our work simply because we do not wish to receive feedback or input from others, we should instead make it quite clear that at this particular moment, we do not wish to receive assistance in our learning journey. Those who wish to help are more than welcome to go document their own learning in public, and perhaps we will stumble upon their work later and it will help us navigate the way forward. But that is something that we must approach on our own time and in our own way.

The public can be, and often is, a cruel place. One where many people will use the display of learning in public as evidence that one is incompetent or foolish, that they don't know what they are doing. And to a degree, with the latter point specifically, they are right. We don’t know what we’re doing, for if we did then we would not be in the process of learning. The entire point of learning is that we would like to know what we're doing. Nonetheless, we must protect our own mental health from the harshness of the internet. If we don’t we might become overwhelmed and retreat to learning in private again. Or worse, share nothing at all.

So, while we should learn in public, we don’t need to learn in the open. We can instead learn in public for those who wish to participate, in a way where we can balance the needs and desires of those who wish to follow our path while protecting our ability to continue along that path. We have a solution for this, and it’s called a community. Each of us builds many communities around us, and we are members of other people’s communities, so this is nothing new. However, the communities of people who are learning in public need to be balanced in specific ways.

For the most part, this means that these communities need to start off paywalled. Perhaps not entirely, there can be some learning in public material that is freely available, to serve as marketing material and to provide some amount of openness. While there might be some public seating around the exterior, the garden itself is a walled one. This has several benefits. For one, it enables people to, assuming they can do all of the things required to build and maintain a community, be someone who learns in public as a career. Or at least as a major component of their career. But it also acts as a filtering mechanism in a way that freely available user accounts does not. The internet being the harsh place it is, there should be a cost for those who wish to harass you, and that cost should be monetary. People on the internet tend to be much more judicious with their dollars than they are with their time. This will also assist in ensuring that those who do want to provide feedback are, more or less, dedicated to being a part of the community and are willing to show their support with both their time and their money.

The walls of the garden don’t have to require money for entry forever, as the community grows, becomes self sustaining, and moderation techniques are implemented, those walls can come down, and the community can become an open place, where anyone who wishes may wander in. This will take time, and for many it will never happen, but the nice thing about learning in public is that it’s eternal. Once you’ve written the words you can choose to publish them to the rest of the world whenever you'd like. And they will be helpful in the future, even if it just serves to assist in understanding that as great as you are, you were always just a human.

From Learning To Teaching

It's not just about learning in public. If we want to help others learn, we also have to teach in public. Those of us who want to learn and teach in public are few and it's rather difficult to find each other. It takes a great deal of ambition and dedication, mixed with a love of writing and storytelling to do both learning and teaching in public. We know we have those traits and the most direct path to finding others who want to do the same is to learn and teach in public ourselves and hope they are inspired to do so themselves.

That's the reasoning behind Skriptble Press, to be a place where learning, thinking, and teaching in public can happen. We want to build digital spaces that enable people to grow their knowledge and help build invisible and seamless technology.

We plan to, in the near future, have a subscription system so that we can build our community. Whether you want to follow along with our learning in public, learn for yourself through our teaching in public, or simply want to support our just cause, we welcome you to join our community and help to grow it into a thriving space.

If you want to support us now, you can sponsor us on GitHub Sponsors. If you want an introduction to us and why we are doing this, you can read that here.