I’ve spent alot of time thinking and talking about what it means to be an expert recently. I’m going to fire down a few of those ideas here, and see where they lead… Feel free to jump in.
Facts and Truths are IMHO not the solid rocks of security they were even 50 years ago. As what my old phil prof called ‘knowledge producers’ increase, get less cohesive, and as their interests diverge, other narratives of truth continue to make their way into the mainstream. The major text-events of our time don’t last very long, and they are written in increasingly changeable media. I was struck today, for instance, about the defense the american ruling government is making against an accused ‘flip-flop‘, an expression now so reified, that most people don’t need an explanation of its meaning, its political rammifications or the reaction against it as a concept. It really only came into general usage in its current form a little over two years ago.
How, I ask you, does one get to be an expert… or, maybe more importantly REMAIN an expert, in such quickly changing times? In times where ‘authority’ is so hard to quantify?
Authority granted by accomplishmentÂ
The context for this particular issue started during our conversations with Larry Sanger about digital universe. Larry was saying that the difference between du and wikipedia was that du would be validated by ‘experts’. During that conversation, i tried to figure out what Larry meant by expert, but he seemed to take the definition as self-descriptive, “an expert is someone who is recognized as an expert.”
At about the same time, I had a conversation with some faculty at a university about the future possibilities of an e-learning project. About half way through, someone turned to me and said, “but what are your qualifications… oh, you don’t have a Phd, we’ll we should consult an expert.” As you might imagine, (certainly those of you who’ve heard me on the podcasts) i did not react very well to this distinction… Does a Phd make me an expert? Should we trust that as validation?
So…Â
So, in both cases, we are looking for authority. People are looking for a way to decide if the person who is writing an article are responsibly reporting the ‘facts’ they’ve discovered – are giving good advice for belief. And that, I think, is what it comes down to. Can I believe this person? And in both of these cases, the people involved are throwing they ‘belief’ over to those who have their doctorate in a given field, or who have published extensively in peer reviewed journals… (which leads us to…)
Authority by communityÂ
Here in blogland, we do that by searching through the ‘nodes’ of people’s interaction. (see G. Siemens) We can look through who links to them, and who they link to and get a sense of what kind of a thinker they are. It doesn’t stop us from looking elsewhere for information, but it does give us the vaguest inkling of where people are coming from. This is authority granted by community.
We are, in a sense, the worlds largest peer reviewed journal. And its a journal that includes various rating systems. There have been oodles of links and comments about Stephen Downes’ elearning 2.0 and George Siemens’ connectivism. They have been, by popular acclaim of their peers, designated experts.
But experts at what? I would not, for instance, approach Stephen for driving lessons. I have, also, had significant (and very entertaining) philosophical disagreements with George. Does it make George right? He would probably not say so, nor has he ever suggested that his status as an expert makes him more ‘right’ than anyone else. In their debate on edtechtalk, the two had significant disagreements. Who is to judge which of them is ‘correct’?
My answer is that no one can. It is a clumsy, difficult and dangerous thing to decide who is correct on any given issue. At the moment of choice, someone is marginalized, a path of discovery is closed off, a possibility for exploration is nipped in the bud.
Many people get irritated with me at this point. They say stuff like “some things have to be true.” We have to be able to “make a decision.” And i’m certainly not espousing the lack of decisions. What I’m saying is the decision between several courses of action is rarely a decision that is ‘right’, but more a decision of what is ‘best’. Regardless of what we ‘believe’.
What is an expert?
An expert, then, would be someone who can present the possibilities that exist, and explain how different choices can lead to different kinds of results. As the quantity of information increases, and the diversity of opinions multiply, I don’t see how any one single person can be an expert in the old sense of the world. It would take a community of people, working in concert, in an openly accessible environment, to allow the many truths to present themselves to public view to allow the looker to judge for themselves which of the paths on a given subject will work for their context.
But isn’t that what a reporter does?Â
In a sense, what i’ve described, is what a reporter does when they go out and get different ideas on a subject. Jeff and I were approached by a gentlemen for an interview for this podcast about wikipedia. He tracked various opinions from various experts regarding the use of wikipedia as a ‘trusted source’. But does that make the reporter an expert, or from a different perspective, does it make the podcast the expert?
I don’t think there’s AN answer to any of these questions. I do believe that a discussion on them is warranted. And the more we continue that discussion, the easier it’ll be to talk about solutions to the challanges that keep arising in our practice.
meme please.
ps. and someone give me a phd please. 🙂
These questions reflect what, in 2004, FC called the Pro-Am Revolution.
“From astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.”
“These far-flung developments [rap, Linux, The Sims] have all been driven by Pro-Ams — committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/87/open_essay.html
Ubiquitous connectivity has fueled this change, and fields of expertise will continue to be questioned as we can “just Google” anything that interests us.
Cheers;
Harold
– currently with a crashed web server 🙁
http://credibilitycommons.org/
just saw this… very interesting.
Great question to pose – what makes an expert? What I see happening through my own efforts at blogging and reading blogs in the education sphere, is a potential “flattening” of hierarchial structures of experts. As a humble classroom practitioner, my access is to experts of my own choice and who have information and ideas of relevance to me. I can know interact with them via comments and offer my own insights. You could have a Ph.D but if I can’t access you, I can’t learn from you.
I’ve done some thinking about this myself. It has also struck me lately by the number of times in podcasts of interviews with experts I’ve lately hears someone say “I don’t have all the answers,” or something like this….
I also think Graham’s answer above is true, the question of “flattening” and who gets to become an expert is interesting. When guys like me, from a small town inthe middle of nowhere, can write a blog that has over 90 subscribers, I’m scared about how we “make” experts. The potential of the number of voices we have and the number of experts that we can have (the latest estimates of the number of people online is around one billion) is astonishing. We must be prepared to read far and wide.
Below are some quotes to give a different perspective on expertise.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman
US educator & physicist (1918 – 1988)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/799.html
There’s a sucker born every minute.
P.T. Barnum
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/p.t._barnum/
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abrahamlin110340.html
* * * *
So let’s agree that a con artist is not an expert but others might not be able to tell the difference, at least not straight away.
More seriously, you might also consider experts by contrasting them to novices.
http://newton.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/ch2.html
So in this way you can distinguish what it means to be expert, on the one hand, from what it means to be regarded as expert, on the other.
I was struck by your reference to possibly arguing with George and that he wouldn’t necessarily consider himself to be ‘right’. I don’t understand how ‘right/wrong’ has anything to do with expertise.
Surely what George offers is based on his own process, education, experience and so expertise. In addition, time must be a factor and with that time an active participation, openness and exploration.
Maybe your questioning comes from the experts, who once they have that Phd feel that that is it and don’t continue to explore. Even hard science changes…
The difficulty today it seems to me in all this is how to wade through all the garbage in the blogs and discern what is worth even reading.
Hi dc,
I agree with you that it has nothing to do with ‘right/wrong’, which was the point I was trying to make. The term ‘expert’ often leads us to the false ‘right/wrong’ dichotomy which is not… shall we say ‘effective’ in an era of multi-narratives. I have the utmost respect for George and his work, which is why i used him as an example of an expert. His response to my blog post only reinforces that opinion, as he quite fairly laid out my position and then objected to the parts that he disagreed with, and quite charitably agreed with others.
I’m not sure if I should take your ‘garbage’ comment as a reflection on the work here or not, 😉 but I was not really speaking about blogging, but of the world in general, and eductional decisions specifically. The question here is, for instance, how would you go and find an ‘expert’ on VLE/PLE/LMS/LCMS if you wanted to choose a new online learning environment for your school. In more traditional cultures, South Korea for example, if someone is considered an ‘expert’ then their opinion is often just taken wholesale. fait accomplit. More on this in a follow up post… I can see that i have not been as clear as i intended.
i have two points i’d like to address. the first point is on the PhD notion . . . i don’t think a PhD makes me an expert, but i do think that a much higher percentage of folks with a PhD are likely to be considered experts in their field than any other group, but they aren’t necessarily “experts” beyond that field. from personal experience, i know that i had to really learn the literature in my field in order to graduate. now that i am employed, i find myself keeping up with the literature so that i can be a better instructor. knowing the literature and being able to apply it and generalize to the real world is much of what makes a person an expert. that being said, many folks who do not have a PhD can also be experts, but they have to demonstrate it another way, i suppose. with some good Google searching, i think just about anyone can be an expert on a great many topics. heh heh.
regarding the blogosphere being a huge refereed journal . . . i never thought of it that way, but i suppose it’s true to an extent. when i write literature for my field, i want it to be read and consumed and used and beneficial to others, etc. on the other hand, i have never considered my blog as a tool to compete for popularity. my blog is a tool that i use for myself so that i can keep track of various tools that i’ve tried previously and why i liked them or didn’t like them and how i was thinking at the time, etc. i also share my blog with my students so that they can get a better sense of how i approach technology and how i make decisions with regard to technology in my teaching since my students will one day be teachers in their own classrooms. i can also use my blog to start discussions in my classes that will help to achieve various curriculum standards, so i find my blog very successful and i doubt a single person links to my blog. i don’t know that many outsiders even visit my blog. if i have outsiders who visit my blog then that’s terrific if they can find it useful or informative, but i don’t see them as my target audience so their absence is not a disappointment to me by any means. if nobody else links to me, i don’t think i am failing as a *thinker* or that this reflects poorly on me in any way. if i wanted to get popular, i suppose one could draw this conclusion. i hadn’t thought of it. i guess i am just not an expert on experts. ;~)
Good distinction between popularity and expert-ness Sean. A valid point to be brought up in the debate. I can assure you, however, that at least one person reads your blog and learns things from it… me.