Two weeks ago I joined Mozilla Science Labs as the program’s first Instructional Designer. My path to MSL had twists and turns: I studied biology in college but graduated with a BFA in studio art; I created science museum exhibits before heading to grad school to study interactive technology; I taught programming while freelancing as a writer of museum audio tours; My last gig was with a design studio that made everything from smartphone apps to immersive media environments. I’m used to switching gears, to being new… you could say I’m professionally new.  And that “first-day” feeling is always still exciting and uncomfortable. There are so many blanks to fill in —new relationships, new systems, a totally new environment to learn and master.

So what can the immersive, full-on learning experience of  “being new” IRL (in real life) tell us about learning more generally, when we’re new to a programming language or a set of practices, like open source?


Secret Languages Create Barriers to Entry
During my first days at Mozilla, I wasn’t surprised to find myself totally lost in very basic conversations. Words like “work week” and “firehose” were tossed about casually; the terms were familiar to me, but the usage was new. Sometimes I’d stop a conversation to get clarification, sometimes I’d just smile and nod, make assumptions based on context cues, and do some frantic googling later on. At the end of my first week I’d collected a dozen mysterious terms, and in the spirit of collaboration, I crowd-sourced definitions from my new colleagues (turns out, the “firehose” is “the entirety of the Mozilla ‘signal’ flooding your inbox, IRC  client,  Skype, texts, phone, Vidyo, GitHub repos, social media, and every waking thought; the large body of information you have to parse…into learning and action items for yourself”).

Every discipline/ institution/culture has its own language, languages that are often opaque to newcomers. “Running a sprint” means one thing to an athlete, another to software developer who wants to gather colleagues together for an intense, focused work session.  The “selector” I use when I’m creating Cascading Style Sheets (which change the visual appearance of a web page) is not the same “selector” I want when I’m throwing a reggae dance party and need someone with a great vinyl collection to choose the tunes. “Panda” and “python” have a particular meaning to the ecologist or snake enthusiast and another to the researcher who’d like to use the general purpose, high-level programming language Python to analyze data (there’s a Python library called Pandas that does just that). Using opaque language can discourage new contributors. And sometimes even those of us fluent in a secret language get so immersed in jargon that we lose track of meaning (here’s a handy jargon-busting tool— see if you can explain your project or mission in plain language).

Open Confusion Can Supercharge Your Learning
As a learner, in the classroom as well as the workplace, it’s been both a huge frustration and a great pleasure to encounter secret languages. Suddenly realizing I have no idea what anyone is talking about is unnerving; groking (grokking?) (programmer slang for “understanding”) a new word means I’m leveling up, becoming part of the tribe, one of the cool kids. Misuse of a term betrays my status as a n00b (that’s internet slang for new, uninitiated user– see image above). To level up, learners need to be in an environment where it’s safe to ask and show confusion. In the world of the web, gaming, and general computer nerdery— even on very useful question and answer sites like Stack Overflow—  there’s an unhelpful undercurrent of scorn for those not in-the-know, or anyone who seems lost or mistaken.  For most of us, asking a question in any environment comes with a possible perceived risk of looking stupid, a sense of risk that’s heightened in academic and professional settings where so much depends on appearing competent at all times. We may conceal our confusion about things we’re “supposed to know” and waste time and energy trying to puzzle them out on our own. Instead, we could use our confusion to open up our learning processes, get help, and create relationships with  other learners and teachers along the way, and improve the learning experience for everyone in our community.

It’s Easy to Forget What You Didn’t Know
As an instructor at community colleges as well as grad programs, I’ve tried to create learning environments that feel safe for all n00bz, where lots of questions and some open confusion are part of the process. When I first started teaching intro programming courses, I thought the fact that I’d come to programming late, as a visual artist, and struggled mightily with my first loops and objects would make me a better, more empathic instructor than the programming ninja who’d been hacking away since 1st grade. But I was surprised to find that those once baffling computer science concepts had become so familiar to me that it was a challenge to explain them clearly to newcomers. I needed to slow down, simplify, unpack all assumptions, and define all terms.  Once we’re fluent in a new discipline, those words and ideas become part of our everyday life, and we forget their strangeness, complexity, and special power. Part of effective teaching is keeping in touch with that sense of being new to topic, that “first day” feeling. For teachers, returning to a learning role in a real way by delving into something outside our field or comfort zone (whether it’s skateboarding or the statistical computing software R) is a good way to expand our teaching skills.

Towards Open Learning and Open Teaching
The tools and languages we have to learn and share have amazing potential. And we expand their potential when we share and learn with people outside our own cozy disciplines and institutions. Working in the open demands that we also teach and learn in the open, and I’m excited to work with others at Mozilla to figure out what this means. Here’s a first pass: as open learners, we’re most effective when we admit what we don’t know, ask brave questions, and give ourselves permission to be openly confused, and actively seek out for allies and collaborators in learning. As open teachers, we’re most effective when we reflect on our assumptions, use transparent language, take time to get to know our learners, encourage their questions and welcome confusion, find learners where they are, and seek out challenging learning experiences for ourselves.

Thanks to Chad Sansing (@chadsansing) for feedback on this post.