Unconscious Competence

Working on the web gift today (and tonight), I’ve come to realize how difficult it must sometimes be for the SMEs I work with. My original thought was to simply create Mike a nice ‘little’ gallery page for the My Family page on his website. Something that uses the thumbnail roll-over (Image Thumbnail viewer II) from http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ . I figured that I would create the page itself, then create a quick tutorial on how to make such a page and include a link to dynamicdrive (which has a great many nifty bits of html code – free to use). But – as I created the images for the page (pulled his into photoshop, resized them, added a border and caption) – I realized that there is more to the page than just the layout and the extra bit of html code. I then realized that I should not assume that my giftee knows how to resize an image, create a border, adjust images so that all are the same size, add a caption, etc. So now – I feel that I should probably add those things to the tutorial. The project grows and my understanding of what it really means to have unconscious competence grows as well. I always understood the concept intellectually, but now I understand it in a more visceral way and I have greater empathy for the SMEs who read the draft of a lesson and don’t realize that something is missing (until they actually look at the lesson in the delivery modality itself). I shall endeavor to be less critical when something comes back after multiple reviews w/ still more required modifications. I may not always succeed, but I will definitely try harder. I’ll remind myself what it is like to just know how to do something w/o really thinking about each little step involved.

It seems like such a "duh" concept, something that should be obvious to a teacher (instructional designer, etc), but I guess there are things we know that we still need to learn again and again. :) Makes life interesting.