Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning
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But, unfortunately, he is wrong on that point. He is wrong, because there is a reason to be selfish with knowledge. If you are selfish with knowledge, then you are creating a scarcity for your knowledge. If your knowledge is more scarce, then you are more valuable and, in our f-ed up society, that means you're gonna get more money to do whatever it is you do.
I don't like this. I loathe this, but that doesn't make it untrue. It is true and it is crap. We need to give people more incentive to share knowledge than they have incentives to hoard knowledge. Most people don't get paid to share knowledge. They get paid to implement solutions based on the knowledge they have and others don't.
Until this sad fact changes, people will continue to hoard knowledge. It ruins organizations all over the planet. Jimmy Bob is the only one who can solve the problem so Jimmy Bob always has a job. If Jimmy Bob taught Bobby Sue how to do the job, then Jimmy Bob would be fired because he costs twice as much as Bobby Sue...
My disagreement comes from years of personal experience with exactly this situation. I'm an ERP consultant and work in places where the entrenched workers have the habit of holding information of how their systems run close to the vest. They seem to think that this enhances their job security. However, they are instead often simply viewed as "necessary evils."
I've come to the realization that every time I share my knowledge with as many people as possible, in as straightforward manner as possible, my value to the organization for which I'm working increases.
Now, I look at my job as one where I am literally finding ways to put myself out of a job. In other words: find efficiencies in the business processes I work with that will remove the need for manual (i.e. my) intervention. Ironically, the more I do this, the more work seems to fall on my lap.
I firmly believe that knowledge is not at all like a cheeseburger.
Of course, sociopaths don't trust, and many organizations (ala The Corporation[1]) are sociopaths. You could avoid working with these organizations, or, if you think you're up to it, you could slowly work to introduce a culture of trust to replace the existing culture of power. You would, however, be seen as "toxic" by anyone who had not yet been transformed[2]. It would be a bit like a normal body cell lodging in a tumor and growing a body out of it. This might be a big jump out of an HN context, but this is basically the premise of the manga/anime series "Great Teacher Onizuka"[3]—the sociopathic organization transformed therein is a school.
[1]: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3203253804055041031
[2]: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/06/21/a_toxic_par...
what i mean is, those rare instances of mentoring, nurturing, collaboration, sharing--those can happen anywhere. maybe they tend to happen outside of school more often. i don't know.
but many times, people view each other as being on opposing teams. competition is great--i love being motivated by a sweet prize, pushing myself towards some awesome goal--but false competition, in which people strive to one-up each other needlessly, hoarding knowledge and putting others down to lift themselves up, really sucks. we can accomplish a lot more together by helping each other out.
i was hoping it would be a presentation on the culture of "we're all learning and getting better" in open source and beyond. nonetheless, this is a reasonable angle; change comes on multiple fronts.
He's actually quite animated in person, and I remember his physics section was rather fun.