Digital Delights

Very good scholars are amazing. They have sophisticated, high-level skills. They generate new knowledge, discover facts we didn't know before, challenge our assumptions, and re-frame the things we already knew.

But as I think we all know, scholars are often not so good at communicating with the general public. And by extension, scholars are not always so good at making themselves understood to undergraduates.

On the cognitive level, it's not hard to explain. Disciplinary knowledge is expert knowledge, and expert knowledge involves highly-facilitated neural pathways. (Or so we're told.) Experts can do things they can no longer explain, because those tasks have become second nature to them. A lot of an expert's knowledge is tacit, not explicit: experts just can't state a lot of what they know.

All of which suggests that very good scholars may not make the best teachers.