## Learning in Public Learning in public is just as it sounds: making your learning process and knowledge available publicly. Most learning these days is done in private and only ever shared once a well polished and highly edited version is produced. This refinement and standard of perfection takes a non-trivial amount of time and creates an invisible barrier to entry which ultimately prevents information from being shared. I am a big proponent of [[Freedom of Information]] and knowledge sharing in general so, naturally, I was drawn to the idea. There are multiple ways to learn in public. You can make YouTube videos, start a blog, start your own [[Digital Garden]], participate in local meet-ups, or join an online group. The possibilities are endless. The idea is, though, that you share what you are learning and your process for learning it. That's it! What you produce does not have to be refined and distilled, in fact it shouldn't be. Learning is a raw process filled with mistakes and edits over time and your content, whatever you decide to do, should reflect that. ### Reasons to Learn in Public #### Help Others Everyone who is an expert at something started as a novice. We have all been there. We want to learn something new so we do a search in Google (or your search engine of choice, I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo) and explore the subject. Sometimes, depending on how niche the subject is, we may find good resources or we may find almost nothing at all. By learning in public, you can contribute to the greater knowledge base and hopefully help the next person that wants to learn about the same topic. Be the person that you wish you had while you were just starting out. ![[lyceum.jpg]] We are beneficiaries of the internet but rarely do we give back. We consume articles, videos, podcasts, but rarely contribute anything of our own in return. The way we use the internet these days is mostly one-sided. It wasn't always this way. I'm old enough to remember an internet that was a sort of digital lyceum where users both contributed and benefitted from the ability to share knowledge across vast geographic distances instantly. Call me old school, but to me this is the ideal use of the technology that we call the internet. #### The Power of Public Commitment There is a certain level of motivation that comes from publicly committing to something. It is easier to give up on a goal if you just keep that goal to yourself -- when the only person you will let down by not keeping up with it is yourself. Telling your friends and family that you will go to the gym five days a week, for instance, motivates you to do so because you don't want to fall short and let others down. The prospect of someone asking you about your progress pushes you. You don't want to tell them that you haven't gone to the gym in a month and fail publicly. A counterargument based on research done by Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at NYU. The study concludes, "Other people’s taking notice of one’s identity-relevant intentions apparently engenders a premature sense of completeness regarding the identity goal."(1) ### Learn Through Teaching Often, the process of explaining something, which forces you to methodically work through your knowledge, sheds light on the areas of a topic that you think you know but don't actually know. Those familiar with programming may recognize similarities to rubber duck debugging, or rubber-ducking, a problem. This is a process where you work through a problem in your code, explaining it to a rubber duck or some other inanimate object, and in the process often coming up with the solution to your problem that was not obvious before. Some other related ideas are the protege effect and Seneca's saying "Docendo discimus" meaning "by teaching, we learn." ### Resources [Learn In Public: The Fastest Way to Learn](https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/) (1) Gollwitzer, P. M., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. E. (2009). [When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap?](https://s18798.pcdn.co/motivationlab/wp-content/uploads/sites/6235/2019/02/gollwitzer-et-al-2009-when-intentions-go-public.pdf) Psychological Science, 20, 612-618