ReinventingTheWheel

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This page was spurred into action by the thought held by many people - "There's no reason to try to reinvent the wheel!"

This is one important way learning happens, to build things yourself. What I think many people are interested in is how to minimize, through time or effort, or both, that process of reinventing the wheel. By giving people the tools and support structures to help them build it faster or differently is a key element to our work in communities.

By simply asking people to learn in a way that relys on experts, who have done the work already, we miss out on the creative potential of new peoples ideas into existing processes and we reinforce the ExpertModel? instead of the OrganizingModel?.

By understanding that a certain amount of reinvention is necessary for a person to learn what we know about these processes helps us to answer questions about community building, such as this one, ExperiencedInteractionWithInexperience. -- MarkDilley

Mark, I think this is one of these paradoxical situations (compare WikiIsParadoxical) which makes me believe that the fundamental building block of thinking is not the understanding of logic, but the understanding of conflicting (paradoxical) forces that only allows dynamical optima by judging individual situations. There are these extremes (1) learning from looking at others, walking pedagocial paths, avoiding redundancy (2) learning by doing, autonomously. The point is the mix. And this can only be done case by case, individually. Also consider MindTheGap. -- HelmutLeitner

Here is something that I have been thinking about in terms of this idea. [Zefrank:The Show] - (a great video weblog that uses a wiki to build community.) -- MarkDilley

ReinventingTheWheel

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