nfoTools
N210901: Essay: Tacit Knowledge and the Beginner Mind
| nfoTools | notes>N210901 | index.html 0.0.8 2022-06-15 |
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Skills: The Importance of What We Know and Forgot We Learned It
Computer specialists and programmers, information-technology practitioners, possess considerable tacit knowledge. That’s knowledge that is unspoken and applied automatically without thought. Sometimes we call it muscle memory. It is ready-to-hand, always available, and effortless. Maybe not so much when the technology or tools change and our attachment to a particular toolcraft is challenged. Then we might champion ours, clinging to it for comfort and confidence. Are you a Mac or a PC? A *nix adherent? BMW, Lincoln, or Lexus admirer?
Maybe it should not be called knowledge if we don’t know we have it? It is a kind of bias too, intrinsic or simply unconscious.
It is difficult for tacit-knowers to convey that knowledge and to see how to instruct others in acquiring it. Explaining themselves to others is challenging. This happens regularly in life, say when a parent attempts to teach a teen-ager how to drive an automobile or to ride a bicycle. Or when a youngster attempts to instruct an older person, or another youngster, in something they take for granted. Likewise, consider when software experts create videos that display extensive unexplained tacit knowledge too rapidly for the less-knowledgable to recognize, let alone comprehend and keep up with what they are being “shown.” There is an important difference between a lesson and a performance.
The Forgetfulness of Learning
I don’t remember learning to walk or learning to speak. Do you? I do recall learning to catch a thrown ball, after overcoming my fear of being struck. I overcame a fear of dogs, something I needed to do in order to bicycle over a newspaper delivery route. I also remember learning to ride a bicycle. The bicycle was full-sized and I wasn’t. Learning to go from wading to swimming was also something I had to be taught. Diving into water was more challenging until it wasn’t. Your list may vary. I suspect you have a list though.
I do remember learning to read and some of learning to write, especially the tedious early practices. Arithmetic came the same way, moving from struggle to delight in geometry and algebra, until advancing in mathematics became challenging once again at the collegiate level. I have been a beginner or amateur in mathematical-logic for my entire adult life. Just don’t regale me about category theory if it is tacit for you and you expect osmosis into my brain.
I’ve learned to type at least twice. Once was in a high-school typing class and my first portabe manual typewriter. The second was learning to type program code into punched cards. Electric typewriters and computer keyboards were easier to master, although there are keys that I can’t touch-type on full keyboards, and I am struggling with the differences of an ergonomic keyboard setup.
There was much about computers and software that I did not understand at first, although I was fortunate to it being a time when digital computers were much simpler than now. I had the luxury of following along as Computer Science was starting up and developing over time, not fed to me in too-short focused curricula.
I gave up on ballroom dancing in my teen years. It was embarassing and awkward. In my 50s, I had the good fortune of taking group ballroom dancing lessons in a club that treasured beginners, providing great guidance at low cost. I and a few friends who wanted to learn thrived in that place. I also learned that many young women were as timid and anxious about learning to dance as I had been as a boy.
I need to develop tacit skills now, years later, in dance-based exercise classes on Zoom. My attempts to directly mimic the instructor are insufficient unless I recognize and learn the multi-step patterns; then I can apply them effortlessly when I see recurrences. Here muscle memory is part of the fitness achievement. It is also very clear when an in-person exercise instructor is performing and not teaching, not attending to us. The best instructors manage student-awareness even in Zoom delivery. I have been fortunate to experience the best instructors for me as an active older adult.
Beginner Mind: Uncovering the Tacit
When I see courses or projects that are invitations to beginners, I tend to bring what I call my beginner mind to it. I want to see how instruction is done in my field, and I want to see how learning is fostered thereby. I look from the perspective of not knowing it already, although I am able to notice deficiencies and understand what is omitted because I am experienced. The trick is for me to let my beginner mind appraise the unsaid, relying on my expertise to then understand the missing connections of the skimpy dots.
It was startling, recently, to observe how much tacit knowledge was left unrecognized in some online courses in their introductions for beginners. In bringing my beginner mind to appraisal of those courses, I realized how many of my tacit understandings were at play. I have been noticing even more lately.
I want any project of mine to provide a meaningful on-ramp for engagement of curious novices. The skills section of nfoTools documentation is devoted to unconcealing of tacit knowledge involved in fluency with computers generally, making the tacitly-overlooked prerequisites for use of a PC explicit. Specific, narrower toolcraft needed to engage with nfoTools at a technical level is addressed in the tools section.
Experts and near-experts might consider from these efforts how they can capture their own tacit understandings and add some hospitality for eager newcomers.
The Opportunity of Broadening Context
Tacit understanding undermines our awareness of alternative and different arrangements that are also worthy of attention. Seeing what is tacit for us, becoming self-conscious about it, provides an opening for identification and distinction of cases that remain invisible otherwise.
There are many examples of this situation, from assuming that everyone is comfortable with English, to recognizing that our favorite ASCII-inspired keyboards are not universal and there are more devices and character codings than the ones we see individually in common use. Recognize from there how to introduce greater adaptivity in what we produce and how we present it.
There is also opportunity to gain some mastery over how the underlying technology is not wedded literally to what we perceive as its surface functionality. This is an area of engineering success, right down to the electronic “bits,” that can be appreciated and also conquered by those enthralled enough about it.
In such ways, distinction of tacitness provides an opportunity to discern even greater reach in approaches to our work.
Related Material
| ID | Started | Status | Topic |
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| N220201 | 2022-02-25 | current | Beginner Mind Failures |
Discussion about nfoTools is welcome at the Discussion section. Improvements and removal of defects in this particular documentation can be reported and addressed in the Issues section. There are also relevant projects from time to time.