I went into my departments SharePoint testing site today in order to try out a new data gathering configuration. The testing site is the place where we try out our ideas before we run them live. I hadn't been to this site for awhile and seeing older test items that I had worked on made me realize how much my knowledge of SharePoint has grown in the last year. When I started my current position, I knew nothing about SharePoint. Now I am the SharePoint data guy and one of the few people in my department who know the program really well. The crazy thing is that I learned everything I know from using the program and trying things out. What started as a reorganization project to help me understand how my department worked, grew into site design work, and then morphed into creating custom data collection tools for the entire division.
I tell you this brief technical story because I think it illustrates the best way that humans learn things. We learn by doing. By getting our hands dirty and trying things out. We learn by tackling real world problems. I think our K-12 education system has, for the most part, lost sight of this fact. Students do not receive enough opportunities to tackle real world problems. A worksheet is not a real world problem.
There is one more point, equally important, from my SharePoint story. I had a testing ground. I had a safe place where I could try out designs, fail, learn from my mistakes, and prepare a product that would succeed when put into actual use. Without that safe place to fail, I never would have been able to create something useful. Failure was a critical component of my learning.
The question on my mind right now, is how do we build schools where students can safely fail as they tackle real world problems so that they can successfully build things that change our world?
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