Can you teach someone how to learn?

[Karen Casemier <karen -dot- casemier -at- provia -dot- com>]

Specifically, can you teach someone how to learn a product so well he or she
becomes an expert? Before I continue, please note the nature of the
question: I do not want to add the longest thread ever on Techwr-l --
technical vs. writer. No, I just want to know if you can teach someone how
to learn a product intimately. Let's completely ignore the fact that that
level of product knowledge may or may not be necessarily in every single
job.

I thought about this as I read John Posada's recent post ("How do you handle
knowing it could be better") about how wished he knew more or could learn
more about the products he is documenting. I chalk this up to simply a lack
of time, because based on all of John's messages I've read in the past four
years I've been on this list, he certainly knows his stuff. He knows how to
become an expert.

But is it possible to teach someone who does not currently know a product
how to learn it -- not teach then directly how to use it, but teach the
skills it takes to learn it on their own?

If I look at the progression of my career as a technical writer, I've gone
through a few phases:
-Not knowing anything about the product I was documenting and relying solely
on being spoon fed information. And happily doing it, and obsessing about
grammar and style because I had no other attachment to my work. And not even
knowing there was a better way.
-Being frustrated at my lack of knowledge, and at the lack of information
available for me to learn. This is when I started devoting more time to just
using the product, and stopped driving myself crazy over crafting the
perfect sentence.
-Realizing that there really WEREN'T any internal experts. Developers know
pieces of the software, and they know how it works behind the scenes, but
very few people understand how the entire product works from the user
perspective. So, I became the internal expert on the product, basically
through attrition. I don't read code well, I didn't know a thing about SQL
when I started (thank you Programming for Dummies and SQL for Dummies), and
I didn't even know much about the subject matter of the software I document.
But SOMEHOW, I learned it. By asking some very focused questions, and
spending a lot of time experimenting.

In my current position, I think I've finally attained power user/expert
status. But to be honest, I don't know if I can break down HOW that
happened. I think part of it has to do with really starting to understand
how relational databases work (but I didn't know that was what I was
starting to understand at the time), and learning how to ask really good
questions (there may be no such thing as a dumb question, but there
certainly is such a thing as a poorly-researched one!).

I wish I would have been able to do this from the start - I wish someone
would have been able to teach me how to do this. I think about the pathetic
attempts I made starting out in this career, and they make me cringe (I hope
I never have to see anything I produced back then!). I wish I knew how to
teach this skill so if we ever bring a new writer in, I can get them moving
in the right direction. But I have no idea how to do it.

Do you? I think this applies to fields outside software; it's just that all
of my techwriting experience has been in software, so my post is biased
towards that.

Or can those of you who have extensive teaching backgrounds give suggestions
as how to break down my own learning process so I can understand it better?

I don't usually post messages like this, but I thought this might be an
interesting topic to discuss. It fascinates me that I know so little about
my own learning process :>) I guess I feel like if I understood it better, I
might be able not only teach it, but improve it.

Karen R. Casemier


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