On Thursday 15th October I gave a talk to an audience at Ignite Cardiff in the Wales Millennium Centre entitled: “If I drive a car does that make me a mechanic?”. It was 5 minute presentation in which I was trying to communicate a core message about how we consider, evaluate and measure knowledge in the age of fast pacing technology.
Increasingly we are seeing hundreds of uses of the term ‘Social Media Expert’ or ‘Web Expert’ on websites, titles, business cards, job descriptions and blog posts about “10 signs of a social media expert’. This is not a new phenomena, we have been interested in expertise and knowledge for generations, who has it, how do you recognise it, how do you measure it, how do you store or capture it?
This is especially evident as it pertains to technology. From computer expertise, to database expertise, system expertise, web expertise, social web (media) expertise. However technology is changing so rapidly, and our ability to keep up and keep abreast of the increasing tide of information starts to beg the question – can anyone really be a technology expert?
From this talk, my intention was to pose to the audience to consider that:
- expetise is about knowledge (type, scope, how acquired) not just usage behaviour, something we often use as a proxy for knowledge.
- different knowledge is acquired in differing contexts so although two things might be similar or related, doesn’t mean you have same knowledge in both.
- think about the terms you use to describe your knowledge, experience and understanding of technology, for what we think we know, doesn’t correlate to what we actually know and terms/labels can be misleading.
- If someone calls themselves a social web (media) expert, chances are they are still learning (and that’s ok!) – its a new young and rapdily changing field. We are all learning. But many of us are not experts.
You can watch my talk below at Ignite Cardiff:
You can also view and download the slides from slideshare or through Issuu:
