Nice demonstration of your point about tacit knowledge.

That said, about the only virtue of printf format strings that I see is that their syntax derives from a common specification. In most languages, the format strings are passed to a core library unaltered, making the syntax invariant on a platform. This feature of python breaks that benefit. To me, it is not a good trade-off.

Absolutely. One of the arguments I make for screencasting — for example here: http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/22/screencasting-tips/ — is that it enables observation and thus imitation that otherwise often couldn’t happen.

Another reason to use the %(name)s idiom is if you want to repeat a value in the string for some reason. It’s much easier to use the dictionary interpolation than count occurrences of %s and compare them to the contents of a tuple to make sure they match up.

Doug

I guess that’s true, but the intermediary role I played here is not strictly necessary. Chris is a practitioner of a discipline in which there are a great many other, and less knowledgeable, practitioners. To the extent he is able to effectively demonstrate what he knows and can do, those who will benefit from looking over his shoulder will discover that they can do so, and they will learn from him.

But it’s not just one-way transmission, if that’s what you’re suggesting. As I mentioned here — http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/07/30/chris-gemignani-recreates-a-new-york-times-infographic-in-excel/ — it can be very much about participation. In that case, folks were both learning from Chris and at the same time teaching him.

Great example. One thing that strikes me from your last 2 paragraphs is that perhaps your idea of transmission as a model of learning isn’t the most compatible with your ideas about building reputation, narrating work, and the underlying notion of participating in a community of practice around something (in this case, Python programming). When we talk about learning as transmission, the underlying model is that we hold all the knowledge we use in our own heads, and the way we acquire new knowledge is by having it passed – one person makes a little kernel of knowledge in their head public, and you receive it and integrate it into your own little in-head stash.

But there is another, more broad, way to think about learning. The sociocultural or situative perspective on learning defines learning as the participation in a particular activity. This is distinct from the actual nugget-passing as a part of that participation, although that nugget-passing is a subset of learning-as-participation. By reframing learning in this way, it really opens us up to consider knowledge in ways that we haven’t before… for example, being able to find a voice in a conversation (in-person or online) about Python is certainly evidence of learning, but it doesn’t quite mesh with the transmission model.

It seems to me that your participation in the discussion with Chris not only caused changes in your own in-head knowledge, but also caused you to write this piece, which serves now to bring us all into the periphery of participation in that community.

Indeed. My ignorance of all that I could have been doing with emacs over the years is entirely due to the fact that I’ve never had many opportunities to look over the shoulder of an emacs adept.

But then you can say the same about almost any application — Excel, for example. Which is why I’m so intrigued by what can happen when an expert user, like Chris Gemignani, gives us the opportunity to look over his shoulder.

Maybe so. I should go back and read Michael Polanyi’s _The Tacit Dimension_ which is where I first encountered this idea.

He was fond of saying ‘we can know more than we can tell’ — which is, come to think of it, not quite the same as ‘we know more than we know that we know’.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/07/05.html

Where can I find your “Walled Garden” essay, mentioned in the recent IT Conversations episode?

John Leeke