Developing Expertise with Racehorses and Sheep

Posted on September 17th, 2008 by Kevin

Today a co-worker sent a link he found on StackOverflow.com of a presentation video by Dave Thomas, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer and owner of a consultancy by a similar name.

In his presentation, called "Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep", Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them as if they all had the same knowledge and level of experience.

I'm in the process of watching the hour-long video myself, so I can't give much of a rundown yet, but it is very insightful if you are interested in your own personal growth or the growth of your peers or employees.

I also noticed a link in the video's comments section that challenges the naive application of software best practices through the Dreyfus learning model.

Filed under: Software

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2 Responses to “Developing Expertise with Racehorses and Sheep”

  1. /\ndy, on September 18th, 2008 at 9:16 am Said:

    For more detailed info on the Dreyfus model and related stuff, please see my new book: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.
    It’s in beta now, and will be in print in about two weeks.
    /\ndy

  2. Kevin Hawkins, on September 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm Said:

    Andy, thanks for the heads up! This is good stuff. I’ll check it out.

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