Sharing Knowledge

Yesterday morning I checked my email and found a message from a young man I did not know. He had looked at my old online portfolio and wanted to know how I had done different things because he had an assignment for a class to create an online portfolio and wanted to do something like mine. I hoped he was talking about my new portfolio because I couldn't remember anything about my old one, but he really wanted to know about the old one. So I looked at it again and tried to remember how I had done things. Since I didn't know very much when I created that one two years ago, it wasn't hard to reconstruct what I had done.

So Gabriel and I spent the day yesterday exchanging emails, him asking questions and me trying to answer. In the end, he had a great looking portfolio ready for his instructor to look at this morning. I feel kind of like a proud mother!

This sharing of knowledge is what makes the world so different today. It isn't about protecting what I know but about seeing how what I know complements what you know and what we can construct with our combined knowledge. It is about how we can learn from each other -- whether we are teachers or students, parents or children, from this country or that. All those divisions are, in some ways at least, artificial.

So I thank Gabriel for asking me to share my knowledge. I learned as much as I taught.