I’ve been recently inspired by the writings of swyx and Nadia Engel on the idea of learning in public. Nadia’s model was to treat her work, writing, and research as public, personal PhD, full of colleagues, mentors, and reviewers. swyx seems committed to the idea of “learning exhaust,” which mostly means to for your learning to not be merely passive, merely consumptive, but instead that learning should produce output in the form of notes, presentations, blogs, vods, tweets, and books.

Both Engel and swyx have compelling takes on learning in public but seem at the outside leaning more heavily on one side of the coin over the other. Engel is focused on the collegial, community-oriented idea of learning in public from and with others but not oriented to specific skills or targets, and swyx seems to be focused on learning by skills openly but not as a pursuit of anchoring others into the work itself. These are no doubt unfair strawmen of their positions, but it’s useful to think of them as separate strategies that I’d like to deploy in combination. Specifically, I’d like to focus on creating learning exhaust that, by its nature, creates community engagement and interaction.

This seems to be a fundamentally right way of doing learning. It’s not sufficient to just fill my mind with neat ideas. Those ideas must be tested and put to use and smashed, smooshed and pushed around by the ideas of others more knowledgeable and able than myself. The goal isn’t to be right at first, it’s to be right eventually, and to be right alongside other experts.

Towards this end, I’m publishing an ongoing list of things I’m learning, how I’m learning them, where I’m discussing them. My hope is that as this project goes on, it leads to inspiring others to learn in public and leads to many, many more friends and colleagues across the topics and areas I find most compelling, confounding, and confusing.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey!