Learning by sharing

This post originally appeared on the blog Learning Learning

When I was in Norway last spring (2013), I kept in touch with people back home a few ways. One was through a blog I regularly occasionally rarely updated. Another was through a writing group that my friends and I put together to share our fiction, poetry, and essays. ‘Write More, Write Better’ was more fun than the blog – reading the excellent stories my friends wrote, I was inspired to write my own. Where the blog felt like an obligation, the writing group was an opportunity to create and share.

While I was abroad, I also started sharing my writing in print: I started writing for the Diamondback (The University of Maryland’s Independent Student Newspaper).  I have shared my opinion in a column every two weeks since then, except summer and winter breaks. This past friday, I wrote about the frustration of writing dumb, context-less papers that are only read by professors and thrown away.

I keep my old papers in a circular file.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that it is a product of blog class. Blog class is a great example of sharing-driven education. Other classes have student blogs or course blogs, and some classes publish student writing in other media. As I argue in the article, the sharing is limited to far too few classes. If no one will ever see my paper, and the assignment is not inherently captivating, I will not care enough to spend time making it good. After the fact, there is little opportunity for feedback and iteration or improvement. All in all, the current system is bad, and the massively better replacement is obvious and easy. Share the work online.

THIS IS A NO-BRAINER.

Sharing is good. 

From my experience, sharing writing makes writing better. I am much better at writing than I was a year ago – faster, clearer, and more concise. You can tell, if you look at my articles and blog! It has not been a constant improvement, but a general trend upward.

I attribute a good deal of the improvement to the feedback I get. When people see an article they like, they tell me. If they disagree, they tell me that too. If the point I tried to make was unclear, I get to revisit the point and try to clarify it, and I learn to be more straightforward in the future. You may have had friends edit your paper before, you know how useful genuine feedback can be. Imagine if you got feedback like that on all of your writing, and on the trends in your writing over time – how very useful it would be! Sharing is good in other ways too.

They know all about sharing. And caring.

Writing for a real audience makes the writing real – I am not just writing this post to get a grade, I actually want to convince you of my point! Not only can genuine context improve your writing and your motivation to write, it can actually make a real difference! Reading what my friends write actually shapes my views – how about that!

Go, start blogs, share on email or facebook, share, share, SHARE!

Sharing isn’t easy, especially if you do not get lots of hits or feedback at first. If you keep bothering your friends about it, eventually you’re likely to write about something interesting to someone, and the conversation will begin. I have been using bitly to shorten links; it automatically and conveniently tracks clicks from different sources, giving you a sense of how wide your message is spreading.

So, maybe you are sold on the whole sharing thing, at least for writing, at least when you have time. If not, let me know, and I can badger you with more reasons why it is good. The internet provides lots of good ways to start sharing some things: text, images, video, web projects. In case you haven’t heard, or never thought of sharing, WordPress, Flickr, and Youtube make it painless to broadcast content. Email, Facebook, and Twitter are also cool, but y’all probably know about all that. I am a fan of Google Drive for document sharing and collaboration, but I know those who use and love Dropbox and Box for file sharing, and you can do the Microsoft or Apple thing too, I guess. Git is unbeatable for code projects, but it is super cool for text that many people might edit together.

Basically, the internet makes sharing super-easy.

Really easy.

What about all the things we learn that don’t fit as nicely on the internet? Can you share what you learn in Business Law or Introduction to Logic? What about the hovercraft or bridges you build in first year engineering?

Are people really going to read your undergraduate research blog?

My answer is yes, they will read it, find a way to document what you are doing, and share it. If that means writing paragraphs about basic business law scenarios or little logic problems, so be it. If you need to take pictures of a project, do that. If instead of the internet, you share through conversations with your friends or family – that’s great too, as long as you share. If you are sharing, you will learn.

Even better than just sharing, you can encourage your friends to share, provide feedback, and help create a sharing community. We aren’t learning alone, no matter how the assignments are designed or graded. Months ago, I wrote a different column about the other side of sharing – Why You Should Read Your Friend’s Stupid Blog.

It’s important!

I can’t possibly take all the classes that everyone else takes – if I want to be all smart-like, I gotta talk to people about those classes! If you want to be all smart-like too, you’ve got to share and participate in the give and take.

Of course, I would be hypocritical if I didn’t take some steps to do better sharing of my own. In order to make it easy for you to view alllll my writing, I made a new page for it – Other Stuff I Wrote. Check it out if you like!

If you have things to share, by all means, include me. I am sometimes good about giving feedback, especially if you ask me directly. The key is not going to be sharing your work in my comment thread though – it’ll be starting your own blog and sharing there.

Now get out and Share!

(Brief Lumosity and Duolingo update: I have been cruising along pretty well on Lumosity, but I have not been very active on Duolingo. According to the Lumosity people, my brain is growing, which is cool – I have yet to notice myself remembering things that I would otherwise forget, but I don’t know when that is supposed to happen. My German has stalled, but hopefully I will plunge back into it once the semester is over… Has anyone gone over and tried either of these sites? Any other interesting daily-training-type sites that I should look into?)