Education works best when it's shared with other people.
One of my jobs at the moment is to think about how best to help educate people moving forward in the fields in which I work, both in terms of our own business here in Nottingham and in terms of an online offering for 100 countries through the ITI.
Thinking about this deeply this week, I realised that online education is a bit like going to the cinema.
If you go to the cinema alone (or even find yourself having space on your own and watching a movie at home), it's not quite the same.
The best way to watch a movie is to watch it with someone else or some others and to share the joy and the excitement and the fear and the drama and the tension and anything that goes with it and to talk about it afterwards.
When you talk about the movie afterwards with someone else, you gain insight. This happens because you are able to see the movie from different perspectives (your own perspective and those of the people with whom you shared the movie in the first place).
This often leads to a deeper understanding of what you've seen or a deeper appreciation of what people were trying to tell you.
This scenario has happened repeatedly in Stuart and Colin Cinema Club, which happens again on Monday night and is one of the great joys of my life.
I have lost count of the times I've walked out, and Stuart will say, "What did you think of this bit?" and I'll think sh*t; I never really realised that that bit was significant, but now I realise it is.
And so, this week, when I was thinking deeply about education, I realised that these are some of the most important parts of education, and because they're some of the most important parts, they're some of the most valuable.
And so, let me give you an example.
If you watch a video in online education on your own, in your house or your bedroom or your office or your surgery, it's a little bit soulish, really. It's dry and cold with no insight, no connection, and no massive value.
Many of us have the ability to produce these videos at length and in great numbers, but the more of these that you produce, the less valuable it becomes, not the other way around.
If you're able to induce and inject into your education connection, that is way more valuable.
If you can use that connection to provide insight into the material with which you're trying to educate people, then the value scales over and over.
It's fine to buy a dental video for £15 that teaches you how to do a procedure, but if it has insight and connection, it's probably worth 100 times that.
Blog Post Number - 3657