Defining Levels of Skill and learning to blog

When do we describe a person or action as skilled?  I am still a novice at setting up a blog.  Today, is better than yesterday – I can see the screen at the top of the classroom and I can hear the speakers.  As a learner, I am experiencing the stress of “effort after meaning” or “the need to know a lot more than I already know”.  This is a feeling that accompanies all learning, especially when you’re out of your depth.   It can be a damned uncomfortable feeling but my knowledge of blogging is developing.

Knowing what to do though is not necessarily the equivalent of knowing how to do it; after all, I could just organise the instructions as one sets out a recipe to make a cake.  I could follow the instructions to perfection and have a perfectly functioning blog as evidence.

But I would not consider myself skilled.  And it would look terrible! So right now, after a quick visual inspection, I can see there is more work to do – bear with me.

 

 

How can we define what it means to be skilled in this context?

My Second Post

Education matters – right? Formal education matters – yes?

But is it enough?

This blog is part of a critical review of the assumption that to become skilled, formal “schooling” is the best or only way.  It certainly offers a lot of opportunities to start the process of becoming competent in a wide range of things;  though having noted that, a lot of life goes on outside of “school”.  After some 40 years, working in the education system, I am not convinced that educational institutions are the best places to become really good at something. I want to explore these doubts. I want to know if anyone else is uneasy about the idea, that the main aim of formal or “school-based” education, should be expressed as “giving people skills for life”.

I am worried that by building curricula around this broad aim, we are wasting a lot of public money and that our kids and young people are wasting a lot of their time.

Early Questions ?????

What is skill?  What do we know about it – from academics? from experts? from skilled people?

What exactly do we mean we talk of a “skilled population”?