[dmarble]

"There's a good half-century of research around high expertise development but some of the most powerful and interesting has been greatly underestimated. The short version: modeling, modeling, modeling. If you want to develop high expertise, spend time, lots of time, observing those with high expertise. If you want to help others develop high, deep expertise, put them in a context where they have as much exposure as possible to expert examples. This could be either examples of the work experts have done or, depending on the domain, observing the experts as they do their work. The problem is, we let beginners (and intermediates) spend way too much time being around mostly other people who are also beginners. In the ideal, perfect, not practical world... everyone would be surrounded only by those who are not just a little better, but with very high expertise.

"The only catch — but this is a tough one for most of us — is that this works far better if the expert does not try to explain what they're doing as they're doing it. In most contexts, the learning is much more robust and accurate and deep if the learner just... watches. Without trying to consciously analyze or ask for justification for every little decision. There’s a time for analyzing the work of those with more expertise, but the counter-intuitive research shows quite strongly that this is more likely to reduce performance, of both the learner and—in many cases—the expert trying to explain how they do what they do!"

Source: http://www.cioinsight.com/it-management/expert-voices/kathy-...

It'd be supremely awesome if companies like LiveCoding could convince experts to live code from time to time. Would certainly pull in lots of visitors. Might even be able to charge for that. Or get experts to record themselves in the flow of work without a live audience, and make a library of such recordings available. Might be a great addition to some EdTech company's offerings.

[BurningFrog]

One of the major advantages of pair programming that I don't hear mentioned much is that you get to learn how others solve programming problems.

I've never learned so much about programming as my first year on a pair programming team. I taught those guys a few of my special tricks too.