Geek Competencies

Helen Haste, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education has identified five competencies that we should be teaching our students:

  • Managing Ambiguity. “Managing ambiguity is that tension between rushing to the clear, the concrete, and managing this ambiguous fuzzy area in the middle. And managing ambiguity is something we have to teach. Because we have to counter the story of a single linear solution.”
  • Agency and Responsibility. “We have to be able to take responsibility and know what that means. Being an effective agent means being able to approach one’s environment, social or physical, with a confidence that one actually will be able to deal with it.”
  • Finding and Sustaining Community. “Managing community is partly about that multitasking of connecting and interacting. It’s also, of course, about maintaining community, about maintaining links with people, making sure you do remember your best friend’s birthday, that you don’t forget that your grandmother is by herself this weekend, and of course recognizing also that one is part of a larger community, not just one’s own private little world.”
  • Managing Emotion. “Really it’s about getting away from the idea that emotion and reason are separate… Teaching young people to manage reason and emotion and not to flip to one or the other is an important part of our education process.”
  • Managing Technological Change. “When we have a new tool, we first use it for what we are already doing, just doing it a bit better. But gradually, the new tool changes the way we do things. It changes our social practices.”

The first four points seem to be the same old “good things” said in new ways – story behind the story, confidence, network and keep cool. The last one, while it is also something that has been said many times before, seems to be to suggest something new at the same time. It comes right out and tells us to expect tools to change the way we do things, not only in a profession, but as a society. It might not seem like a big deal, but I think it is.

If you put this together with the idea in Wired this weekend about geeks:

“Geeks get things done. They’re possessed. They can’t help themselves,”

You might have the groundwork for a really big idea – tools will change society, and to do it, you need to “geek out” at something – pursue it until it is finished. If every student is able to change some small part of their own world, it might certainly help make this world a better place.


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