Quotes from Greg Wilson

The world doesn't get better on its own. It gets better because people make it better: penny by penny, vote by vote, and one lesson at a time. So: Start where you are. Use what you have. Help who you can.

so that people don't have to learn these things on their own, but ironically, their founders and instructors are often teaching themselves how to teach.

teaching isn't their primary occupation, they have little or no background in pedagogy, and they may work outside institutional classrooms.

many reasons to learn how to program: To understand our world. To study and understand processes. To be able to ask questions about the influences on their lives. To use an important new form of literacy. To have a new way to learn art, music, science, and mathematics. As a job skill. To use computers better. As a medium in which to learn problem-solving.

Tutorials frustrate competent practitioners because they move too slowly and say things that are obvious (though they are anything but obvious to novices). Equally, manuals frustrate novices because they use jargon and don't explain things. This phenomenon is called the expertise reversal effect

If the teacher presents too much information too quickly, the new will displace the old before it has a chance to consolidate in long-term memory.

Working over 21 hours in a stretch increases the odds of you making a catastrophic error just as much as being legally drunk.

Every instructor needs three things: content knowledge , such as how to program; general pedagogical knowledge , such as an understanding of the psychology of learning; and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), which is the domain-specific knowledge of how to teach a particular concept to a particular audience.

In computing, PCK includes things like what examples to use when teaching how parameters are passed to a function, or what misconceptions about nesting HTML tags are most common.

It is surprising how little page space is devoted to bugs and debugging in most introductory programming textbooks.

We don't know enough yet to recommend typed or untyped languages for novices.

Jugyokenkyu is a bucket of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft, from observing each other at work to discussing the lesson afterward to studying curriculum materials with colleagues. The practice is so pervasive in Japanese schools that it is…effectively invisible.

If you are teaching in a free-range setting, your learners are probably volunteers, and probably want to be in your classroom. The exercise therefore isn't how to motivate them, but how to not demotivate them. Unfortunately, you can do this by accident much more easily than you might think.

Consciously or unconsciously, teachers tend to focus their attention on learners who seem to be doing well. That extra attention increases the odds that they will, while the corresponding neglect of other learners leaves them further and further behind

If you are going to build a community, the first and most important thing you have to decide is what you want: to help people succeed in the world we have, or to give them a way to make a better one. Either way, you have to accept that one person can only do so much. Just as we learn best together, we teach best when we are teaching with other people, and the best way to achieve that is to build a community.

Your best source of new recruits is your own classes: "see one, do one, teach one" has worked well for volunteer organizations for as long as there have been volunteer organizations. Make sure that every class or other encounter ends with two sentences explaining how people can help, and that help is welcome.