2010: Discount Teaching and Hypergogues

What's it like to be a teacher?
You find teachers pretty much everywhere, here's a non-exhaustive list of people who teach:

trainers, parents, managers, lecturers, professors, business entertainers, gurus, actors, newsreaders, journalists, writers, bloggers, webmasters, teachers, coaches, mentors, colleagues, every single person on the planet

Some people seem to think teaching should be a bit like this:


Others, of a more analytical bent, think it's like this:


However, there's a good deal of evidence that teachers are actually doing something more akin to this:

Examples of teaching like this are everywhere. (English grammar is an especially exemplary example of this.)

I would suggest that teaching is a little like this (from xkcd):

Though some would take issue with this. (There are a vocal group (a minority? a majority?) who claim that teaching is something that you can only do if you are accredited.) But I think this is pretty near to the truth for large numbers of people who teach.

Here's my version, just to be clear (click for bigness):

Jakob Nielsen writes in his latest post, Anyone Can Do Usability, that in usability:

Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert; it's not a dichotomy. Every time you learn something, your performance improves. Usability and cooking are particularly suited for continuing education, because anything you learn will remain useful for many years to come. This is why I place so much emphasis on usability training: you get better results for every extra bit you learn.

I feel the same way about teaching and I would add it to the pot along with usability and cooking. Everybody should be doing it. (And almost nobody should be doing only it and nothing else.)

Jakob Nielsen's big idea is Discount Usability. Usability is so important that everybody should do it. We should embrace the amateur because:

The true choice is not between discount and deluxe usability engineering. If that were the choice, I would agree that the deluxe approach would bring better results. The true choice, however, is between doing something and doing nothing. Perfection is not an option. My choice is to do something!

(I'm not even sure that this is true. I'm not even sure that the 'deluxe' approach would bring better results.)

If you look hard enough, you'll find people teaching everywhere. Here's a couple I came across today while busy procrastinating during the writing of this last paragraph. (plus one which I share every chance I get because it's one of my favourites - guess which one?)

• Scientists arguing. 
• Making a game. 
• Badgering your followers on Twitter (check out the story bit on Elissa Miller)

So, Merry Christmas. I'll leave you with my big question (and project) for next year:

• What do you need to know in order to be a 'teacher'?
• Do you have to go to an accredited training centre to learn this stuff?
• What is it that teachers need to know in order to do what they do well?

I'm pretty convinced that the answers aren't only to be found in schools. And that the marketers and the Knowledge Managers and the Gamers and the UX guys and the Service Design people (and all the other bloggers, Information Architects, programmers, business people, scientists, agents provocateurs, policy wonks, geeks, nerds and dweebs) have got a lot to teach us.

I'm also pretty convinced that the word teacher is ineluctably associated with schools (which is a shame, because many people I know aren't at all convinced that school is about teaching. . .)

So, I'm calling the project, Hypergogue: a totally made-up word for people who teach but don't necessarily have the word teacher in their job title. And the project has two goals:

• to be a resource that people could use to teach themselves to teach
• to be a resource that learners could visit to find out how good (or bad) their teachers are

There's a posterous blog where I'm collecting interesting tidbits. There's a Twitter list of Hypergogues (not to be confused with Venessa Miemis' excellent list of metacogs.) There'll be a website ready for Easter. (It's currently here if anybody has any suggestions of what they'd like to see on it.)

I'd love to know if you think this idea is good/bad/terrible/vaguely unsettling/incomprehensible. So please leave a comment or @ me on Twitter.

See you in January when I'll be sharing my ten new year's resolutions (with some linky goodness, natch) and asking for help: why is it that I hate eLearning so much and can anybody persuade me how wrong I am?