I’m always trying to improve in my role as a professor, and I’m also always trying to make it a less difficult, or at least a less all-consuming, job. I take the role very seriously, and I try to do well at it, and it’s for that reason that I constantly question the way that I do it, and question the very nature of the job itself.

One thing I believe is that self-education — learning for oneself through experience or self-motivated research — is more effective and long-lasting than being told/taught something by someone else. I also find traditional teaching — lecturing from an assumed position of greater knowledge to those who are passively listening in an assumed position of lesser knowledge — to be an activity that mostly benefits the vanity of the lecturer, more than the education of the listeners. Of course, the professor does usually know more about the given topic than the students. The question, though, is: what is the best way for the professor to help the students to increase their wisdom?

For this class, where so much information already is published online, and where each student’s background and interests are so different, I believe that the best model for the students in the class is that of a research team — a group of individuals all trying to research and learn about the same body of knowledge, all sharing their learning, and all assisting each other. In this model, the professor is the leader of the research team, guiding the focus of the research and suggesting approaches, but the vast majority of the learning is accomplished by the team members themselves, through research, experimentation, conversation, and sharing of information.

The most crucial activity of a successful research team (in addition to researching, obviously) is sharing information. As one learns, one shares that learning with others. The team as a whole learns much more than if all the information were coming from one individual (such as the professor), and each individual in the team receives more information than s/he could research alone. Therefore, a key component of a research team is the active dissemination of one’s own research, through writing and conversation.

The class Wiki and the Q&A site are the loci of most of that writing and conversing. The professor contributes to those, and also contributes with lecture/presentations in class, which present crucial information in (one hopes) a focused, concentrated, and clear manner that provides guidance and direction for the next step in the team’s research and experimentation. But the main contributors to the body of information must be the team members themselves, through active and constant writing and engaging with each other.