Gossiping is the new self-taught

The topic of Special Issue 29 unlocked a game-changing awareness on my past, present, and future pedagogical path. I could never answer this question:

How do I know what I know?

Nobody ever canonically taught me any of the technical skills that I know, and I seldom had technically-oriented classes in my academic path. Still, I never considered myself “self-taught”, both for practical reasons (how could someone actually teach themselves something?) and for ideological ones (I refuse the individualistic and isolated narrative of learning things alone). At the same time, I am extremely chaotic and I have never studied or learned from books consistently. Hence, the question remains: where did my knowledge (especially technical) come from?

The truth is that I absorbed and processed information through gossip, that is through informal, non-hierarchical, unstructured and possibly incorrect sources.

You would not (and should not) fully trust the authenticity of a gossipy information source. When in a technological context in particular, gossip as a pedagogical tool is key, because its intrinsically apocryphal nature forces the receiver to question, re-interpret, and test the information by experimenting with it. There is only one way to test if sowtware works: to test it. Working technical solutions could be made more efficient, performant, or generally improved, but this is not the role of gossip pedagogy, as it enters the domain of productiveness/performativeness, where the value of de-constructing societal concepts is jeopardised.

• +++TTODO: Vernacular learning as the vernacular Web