The Glass is Too Big - Home

Earlier today, I had bookmarked a post by John Udell on how he had his interest in the idea of tacit knowledge tweaked. I had not paid attention to his original post on the topic or hadn't seen it. However, upon reading a bit about the topic, I felt my own interest resonating deeply.

A quick overview of the concept is that tacit knowledge is the stuff we know, but can't explain to anyone. Some of it is the impulse stuff that Gladwell wrote about and some is more the stuff of regular practice and having a process that you "just do".

Much of my activity on this site (particularly in the tutorial material) is an attempt to analyze that about the things that I "just do", making this concept really interesting to me.

Then, tonight, before I had a chance to write about Udell's post, I had a phone conversation that brought the issue to a more concrete reality. My brother is in the middle of setting up the wireless router at my parents' house (they finally had DSL made available today) and called me to ask for help. After getting his own laptop to work, he was working on my mom's and getting nowhere.

It wasn't seeing any networks, etc. This is the kind of thing I've fixed numerous times. Yet, when asked to explain how to fix it, I drew a complete blank. All I could do was itch to get in front of the monitor and at the keyboard to fix it. I'm confident I could fix it if it were in front of me, but was at a complete loss to explain how I'd do it.

I really do like Udell's appeal to screencasting as a way of revealing some of this knowledge. Garrick's been using them to document for himself and for demo purposes, the new product he's building. I think they really do help share tacit knowledge as well as the explicit knowledge deliberately shared.

To that end, I'm actually doing a couple of screencasts internally at work to document some processes rather than write up documents. For stuff I actually know how to do, this is far easier than trying to write it up. Who knows, once I get a toolchain and process worked out, I may put more of them up here as well.

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