Lean Teaching
Eating your own dog food! That is what I learned about building BagTheWeb.
I have the most fun using Bag, the tool we created, for collecting web content resources to fulfill so many of my personal needs.
Bag is a good content container for information processing, such as writing a blog post, preparing a public speech, doing homework, researching a topic, tracking news buzz, and so on.
Although people can use Microsoft Word, email, a piece of paper, Evernote, blog sites, and other tools to collect and save a group of web content resources, they usually don’t publish and share the semifinished content.
Bag provides a new standard for turning semifinished content into a formal publication. The idea can be applied to many uses, such as informal learning, lean teaching, etc.
Let me share a story of Lean Teaching, which is a term I coined recently.
A CS student who didn’t know GitHub
Last year a UCIC student worked for us as a summer intern. He was a computer science master’s student and wanted to gain experience in web application development, by working for a small start-up team such as our team.
On the morning of the first day I met him, I picked up him at a hotel and drove to our office. On the road, we chatted about lots of things such as his background, interest, etc. To my surprise, he did not know GitHub and never played a real live site like a Wordpress blog site on the Web. Instead of using Google Reader to pull information, he used Facebook for reading the news and getting information.
And he didn’t blog.
During the next 30 days, I decided to teach everything I know about web application development, culture, and trends by creating bags. I am not a programmer but a product guy who works on product strategy, information architecture, user experience, and user interface design. Sometimes, I like playing WordPress blog software just for fun.
The SMOOC project
I started building a group of bags tagged with #SMOOC which stands for Small Medium Open Online Course because I only had one student.
The Day 1 bag is titled Understanding Tagging, Long Tail, and Openness. I collected 10 web resources and wrote the following description for the bag:
Tasks:
1. Watch Don Tapscott’s Talk
2. Read “Long Tail” Wikipedia item and the original article on WIRED
3. Using BagTheWeb, Flickr to share contents
4. Find contents on YouTube, TED, Slideshare, and Vimeo
5. Check out links and videos about Public Parts
I spent about 30 minutes to build a bag each day. The topics for the SMOOC bags cover the history of the social web, free culture, user experience terms, and even startup culture.
The second day was Saturday. I created a bag called No Weekend, Do More Faster! with the following description.
Today is Saturday. It’s a normal weekend. But at Startup Weekend, over 45,000 people around the world have launched their products in 54 hours. Entrepreneurship is all about learning through the act of creating. Do more faster!
Tasks:
1. Watch the Startup Weekend video and check out the Startup Weekend bag.
2. Check out Startup Weekend’s Flickr account, and my 2011 2nd Houston Startup Weekend Flickr set
3. Read blog posts about Startup Weekend
4. Check out the Harvard innovation lab website
5. Rebag the Do More Faster link to build a new bag about the book
Every day I chatted with him a little behind a whiteboard and made a bag for him. The better I got to know him, the bag I created for the next day was more close to his needs.
The Art of Sharing
I don’t have an academic background education. I didn’t have enough time to prepare a bag in the same way that a teacher prepares a class for students.
I do have a good habit of loving sharing.
I know some content on the Web matches the situation of the intern and the purpose of the teaching I did each day. I just found stuff on the Web and bagged it by using the “bag it” bookmarklet I installed on my browser.
In fact, I told him a BDDi framework that guides me in building the SMOOC bags. The BDDi stands for Business, Design, Development, and Impact.
Learning is hard — teaching is harder. The challenge is how we organize it.
Wikipedia is good for sharing explicit knowledge, Quora is good for sharing implicit knowledge, Twitter is good for sharing news, Branch is good for opinions, and Medium is good for sharing ideas and thoughts.
MOOCs sites are good for sharing education resources monopolized by Ivy League universities.
It’s a great time for everyone to be a teacher with so many great tools for sharing everything.
P.S. The cover image is a thank you card the intern presented to me on the last day of his intern work.
