Been attending sessions by Meri Aaron Walker about online methods to get paid for our expertise. Meri coaches teachers about those issues.
MAWSTOOLBOX.COM
There’s also a LearnHub “course”: Jumpstart Your Online Teaching Career.
Some notes, on my own thinking about monetization of expertise. Still draft-like, but RERO is my battle cry.
Some obstacles to my selling expertise:
Despite all these obstacles, I have been thinking about selling my services online.
One reason is that I really do enjoy teaching. As I keep saying, teaching is my hobby (when I get paid, it’s to learn how to interact with other learners and to set up learning contexts).
In fact, I enjoy almost everything in teaching (the major exception being grading/evaluating). From holding office hours and lecturing to facilitating discussions and answering questions through email. Teaching, for me, is deeply satisfying and I think that learning situations which imply the role of a teacher still make a lot of sense. I also like more informal learning situations and I even try to make my courses more similar to informal teaching. But I still find specific value in a “teaching and learning” system.
Some people seem to assume that teaching a course is the same thing as “selling expertise.” My perspective on learning revolves to a large extent on the difference between teaching and “selling expertise.” One part is that I find a difference between selling a product or process and getting paid in a broader transaction which does involve exchange about knowledge but which isn’t restricted to that exchange. Another part is that I don’t see teachers as specialists imparting their wisdom to eager masses. I see knowledge as being constructed in diverse situations, including formal and informal learning. Expertise is often an obstacle in the kind of teaching I’m interested in!
Funnily enough, I don’t tend to think of expertise as something that is easily measurable or transmissible. Those who study expertise have ways to assess something which is related to “being an expert,” especially in the case of observable skills (many of those are about “playing,” actually: chess, baseball, piano…). My personal perspective on expertise tends to be broader, more fluid. Similar to experience, but with more of a conscious approach to learning.
There also seems to be a major difference between “breadth of expertise” and “topics you can teach.” You don’t necessarily need to be very efficient at some task to help someone learn to do it. In fact, in some cases, being proficient in a domain is an obstacle to teaching in that domain, since expertise is so ingrained as to be very difficult to retrieve consciously.
This is close to “do what I say, not what I do.” I even think that it can be quite effective to actually instruct people without direct experience of these instructions. Similar to consulting, actually. Some people easily disagree with this point and some people tease teachers about “doing vs. teaching.” But we teachers do have a number of ways to respond, some of them snarkier than others. And though I disagree with several parts of his attitude, I quite like this short monologue by Taylor Mali about What Teachers Make.
Another reason I might “sell my expertise” is that I genuinely enjoy sharing my expertise. I usually provide it for free, but I can possibly relate to the value argument. I don’t feel so tied to social systems based on market economy (socialist, capitalist, communist…) but I have to make do.
Another link to “selling expertise” is more disciplinary. As an ethnographer, I enjoy being a “cultural translator.” of sorts. And, in some cases, my expertise in some domains is more of a translation from specialized speech into laypeople’s terms. I’m actually not very efficient at translating utterances from one language to another. But my habit of navigating between different “worlds” makes it possible for me to bridge gaps, cross bridges, serve as mediator, explain something fairly “esoteric” to an outsider. Close to popularization.
So, I’ve been thinking about what can be paid in such contexts which give prominence to expertise. Tutoring, homework help, consulting, coaching, advice, recommendation, writing, communicating, producing content…
And, finally, I’ve been thinking about my domains of expertise. As a “Jack of All Trades,” I can list a lot of those. My level of expertise varies greatly between them and I’m clearly a “Master of None.” In fact, some of them are merely from personal experience or even anecdotal evidence. Some are skills I’ve been told I have. But I’d still feel comfortable helping others with all of them.
I’m funny that way.
Domains of Expertise
French
- Conversation
- Reading
- Writing
- Culture
- Literature
- Regional diversity
- Chanson appreciation
Bamanan (Bambara)
Social sciences
- Ethnographic disciplines
- Ethnographic field research
- Cultural anthropology
- Linguistic anthropology
- Symbolic anthropology
- Ethnomusicology
- Folkloristics
Semiotics
Language studies
- Language description
- Social dimensions of language
- Language change
- Field methods
Education
- Critical thinking
- Lifelong learning
- Higher education
- Graduate school
- Graduate advising
- Academia
- Humanities
- Social sciences
- Engaging students
- Getting students to talk
- Online teaching
- Online tools for teaching
Course Management Systems (Learning Management Systems)
- Oncourse
- Sakai
- WebCT
- Blackboard
- Moodle
Social networks
- Network ethnography
- Network analysis
- Influence management
Web platforms
- Facebook
- MySpace
- Ning
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Jaiku
- YouTube
- Flickr
Music
- Cultural dimensions of music
- Social dimensions of music
- Musicking
- Musical diversity
- Musical exploration
- Classical saxophone
- Basic music theory
- Musical acoustics
- Globalisation
- Business models for music
- Sound analysis
- Sound recording
Beer
- Homebrewing
- Brewing techniques
- Recipe formulation
- Finding ingredients
- Appreciation
- Craft beer culture
- Brewing trends
- Beer styles
- Brewing software
Coffee
- Homeroasting
- Moka pot brewing
- Espresso appreciation
- Coffee fundamentals
- Global coffee trade
Social media
Blogging
- Diverse uses of blogging
- Writing tricks
- Workflow
- Blogging platforms
Podcasts
- Advantages of podcasts
- Podcasts in teaching
- Filming
- Finding podcasts
- Embedding content
Technology
- Trends
- Geek culture
- Equipment
- Beta testing
- Troubleshooting Mac OS X
Online Life
Communities
- Mailing-lists
- Generating discussions
- Entering communities
- Building a sense of community
- Diverse types of communities
- Community dynamics
- Online communities
Food
- Enjoying food
- Cooking
- Baking
- Vinaigrette
- Pizza dough
- Bread
Places
- Montreal, Qc
- Lausanne, VD
- Bamako, ML
- Bloomington, IN
- Moncton, NB
- Austin, TX
- South Bend, IN
- Fredericton, NB
- Northampton, MA
Pedestrianism
- Carfree living
- Public transportation
- Pedestrian-friendly places
Tools I Use
- PDAs
- iPod
- iTunes
- WordPress.com
- Skype
- Del.icio.us
- Diigo
- Blogger (Blogspot)
- Mac OS X
- Firefox
- Flock
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Maps
- Zotero
- Endnote
- RefWorks
- Zoho Show
- Wikipedia
- iPod touch
- SMS
- Outlining
- PowerPoint
- Slideshare
- Praat
- Audacity
- Nero Express
- Productivity software
Effective Web searches
Socialization
- Social capital
- Entering the field
- Creating rapport
- Event participation
- Event hosting
Computer Use
- Note-taking
- Working with RSS feeds
- Basic programing concepts
- Data manipulations
Research Methods
- Open-ended interviewing
- Qualitative data analysis
Personal
- Hedonism
- Public speaking
- GERD
- Strabismus
- Moving
- Cultural awareness
8 Comments | tags: Academia, Advantages of podcasts, Audacity, Austin, baking, Bamako, Bamanan, Bambara Conversation, Bambara Greetings, Basic music theory, Beer, Beer Appreciation, Beer styles, Beta testing, Blackboard, Blogger (Blogspot), Blogging, blogging platforms, Bloomington, bread, brewing software, Brewing techniques, Brewing trends, Building a sense of community, Business models for music, Carfree living, Chanson appreciation, Classical saxophone, Coffee, Coffee fundamentals, Communities, Community dynamics, cooking, course management systems, craft beer culture, Creating rapport, critical thinking, cultural anthropology, Cultural dimensions of music, Data manipulations, del.icio.us, Diigo, Diverse types of communities, Diverse uses of blogging, Education, Effective Web searches, Embedding content, EndNote, Engaging students, Enjoying food, Entering communities, Entering the field, equipment, Espresso appreciation, Ethnographic disciplines, Ethnographic field research, ethnomusicology, Event hosting, Event participation, expertise, Facebook, Filming, Finding ingredients, Finding podcasts, Firefox, Flickr, Flock, folkloristics, Food, Fredericton, French Conversation, French Culture, French Literature, French Reading, French Writing, geek culture, Generating discussions, GERD, Getting students to talk, Global coffee trade, globalisation, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Graduate advising, Graduate school, hacking, hedonism, higher education, homebrewing, homeroasting, Humanities, Influence management, Internet Explorer, iPod, iPod touch, iTunes, Jaiku, language change, Language description, Language studies, Lausanne, LearnHub, Learning Management Systems, Lifelong learning, linguistic anthropology, LinkedIn, Mac OS, mac os x, mailing-lists, Meri Aaron Walker, Moka pot brewing, Moncton, monetization, Montreal, Moodle, music, Musical acoustics, Musical diversity, Musical exploration, musicking, MySpace, Nero Express, network analysis, Network ethnography, Ning, note-taking, Oncourse, online communities, Online Life, Online teaching, Online tools for teaching, Open-ended interviewing, Outlining, PDAs, Pedestrian-friendly places, Pedestrianism, Pizza dough, podcasts, Podcasts in teaching, PowerPoint, Praat, Productivity software, Public speaking, public transportation, Qualitative data analysis, Québec, Recipe formulation, RefWorks, Regional diversity, Research Methods, RSS, Safari, Sakai, Semiotics, Skype, SlideShare, SMS, social capital, Social dimensions of language, Social dimensions of music, social media, social networks, social sciences, socialization, sociolinguistics, Sound analysis, Sound recording, South Bend, Strabismus, Symbolic anthropology, technology, trends, Troubleshooting Mac OS X, Twitter, Vinaigrette, Web platforms, WebCT, Wikipedia, WiZiQ, WordPress.com, workflow, Writing tricks, YouTube, Zoho Show, Zotero | posted in ramblings
As mentioned recently (among other times), I’d like to get more reader comments than I do now. Haven’t been really serious about it as I’m not using any of the several methods I know to get more comments. For instance, I realise shorter, quick-and-dirty posts are likely to get me more comments than my longer ramblings. Everybody knows that inflammatory (Dvorak-like) posts get more comments. I also know that commenting on other people’s blog entries is the best way to receive comments from fellow bloggers. Not to mention generating something of a community aspect through my blog. And I could certainly ask more questions in my blog posts. So I guess I’m not doing my part here.
It’s not that I care so much about getting more comments. It’s just that I do like receiving comments on blog posts. Kind of puts me back into mailing-list mode. So I (frequently) end up wondering out loud about blog comments. I don’t really want to make more of an effort. I just want my cake and eat it too. (Yes, this one is an egotistical entry.)
One thing I keep noticing is that I get more comments when I get less readers. It’s a funny pattern. Sounds like the ice-cream/crime (ice-crime?) correlation but I’m not sure what the shared cause may be. So my tendency is to think that I might get more comments if I get lower readership. I know, I know: sounds like wishful thinking. But there’s something fun about this type of thinking.
Now, how can I decrease my readership? Well, since a lot of readers seem to come to this blog through Web searches and Technorati links, I guess I could decrease my relevance in those contexts. Kind of like reverse-SEO.
As my unseemly large number of categories might be responsible for at least some of that search/Technorati traffic, getting rid of some of those categories might help.
On this WordPress.com blog, I’ve been using categories like tags. The Categories section of WordPress.com’s own blog post editor makes this use very straightforward. Instead of selecting categories, I just type them in a box and press the Add button. Since WordPress.com categories are also Technorati links, this categories-as-tags use made some sense. But I ended up with some issues, especially with standalone blog editors. Not only do most standalone blog editors have categories as selection items (which makes my typical tagging technique inappropriate) but the incredibly large number of categories on this blog makes it hard to use any blog editor which fetches those categories.
Not too long ago, WordPress.com added a tagging system to their (limited) list of supported features. Given my issues with categories, this seemed like a very appropriate feature for me to use. So the few posts I wrote since that feature became available have both tags and categories.
But what about all of those categories? Well, in an apparent effort to beef up the tagging features, WordPress.com added Category to Tag Converter. (I do hope tagging and categories development on WordPress.com will continue at a steady pace.)
This converter is fairly simple. It lists all the categories used on your blog and you can either select which categories you want to convert into tags or press the Convert All button to get all categories transformed into tags. Like a neat hack, it does what it should do. I still had to spend quite a bit of time thinking about which categories I wanted to keep. Because tags and categories perform differently and because I’m not completely clear on how tags really work (are they also Technorati tags? Can we get a page of tags? A tag cloud?), it was a bit of a shot in the dark. I pretty much transformed into tags most categories which I had only applied to one post. It still leaves me with quite a few categories which aren’t that useful but I’ll sort these out later, especially after I see the effects tags may have on my blogging habits and on my blog itself.
As luck would have it, this change in my blog may have as an impact a decrease in readership and an increase in comments. My posts might end up being more relevant for categories and tags with which they are associated. And I might end up having sufficiently few categories that I could, in fact, use blog editors on this blog.
While I was converting these categories into tags, I ended up changing some categories. Silly me thought that by simply changing the name of a category to be the same as the name of another category, I’d end up with “merged categories” (all blog posts in the category I changed being included in the list for the new categories). Turns out, it doesn’t really work like that and I ended up with duplicate categories. Too bad. Just one of those WordPress.com quirks.
Speaking of WordPress.com itself. I do like it as a blogging system. It does/could have a few community-oriented features. I would probably prefer it if it were more open, like a self-hosted WordPress installation. But the WordPress.com team seems to mostly implement features they like or that they see as being advantageous for WordPress.com as a commercial entity. Guess you could say WordPress.com is the Apple of the blogging world! (And I say this as a Macaholic.)
Just found out that WordPress.com has a new feature called AnswerLinks, which looks like it can simplify the task of linking to some broad answers. Like several other WordPress.com features, this one looks like it’s mostly meant as a cross-promotion than a user-requested feature, but it still sounds interesting.
Still, maybe the development of tag features is signalling increased responsiveness on the part of WordPress.com. As we all know, responsiveness is a key to success in the world of online business ventures.
12 Comments | tags: blog comments, blog editors, business models, categories, causality, determinism, egoticism, John C. Dvorak, macaholics, mailing-lists, meta-blogging, online communities, readership, responsiveness, reverse-SEO, self-promotion, SEO, statistics, tags | posted in Blogging, Cluetrain Manifesto, comment-fishing, Digital Life, linkfest, ramblings, shameless plug, WordPress.com
Readership to Comments Conversion
As mentioned recently (among other times), I’d like to get more reader comments than I do now. Haven’t been really serious about it as I’m not using any of the several methods I know to get more comments. For instance, I realise shorter, quick-and-dirty posts are likely to get me more comments than my longer ramblings. Everybody knows that inflammatory (Dvorak-like) posts get more comments. I also know that commenting on other people’s blog entries is the best way to receive comments from fellow bloggers. Not to mention generating something of a community aspect through my blog. And I could certainly ask more questions in my blog posts. So I guess I’m not doing my part here.
It’s not that I care so much about getting more comments. It’s just that I do like receiving comments on blog posts. Kind of puts me back into mailing-list mode. So I (frequently) end up wondering out loud about blog comments. I don’t really want to make more of an effort. I just want my cake and eat it too. (Yes, this one is an egotistical entry.)
One thing I keep noticing is that I get more comments when I get less readers. It’s a funny pattern. Sounds like the ice-cream/crime (ice-crime?) correlation but I’m not sure what the shared cause may be. So my tendency is to think that I might get more comments if I get lower readership. I know, I know: sounds like wishful thinking. But there’s something fun about this type of thinking.
Now, how can I decrease my readership? Well, since a lot of readers seem to come to this blog through Web searches and Technorati links, I guess I could decrease my relevance in those contexts. Kind of like reverse-SEO.
As my unseemly large number of categories might be responsible for at least some of that search/Technorati traffic, getting rid of some of those categories might help.
On this WordPress.com blog, I’ve been using categories like tags. The Categories section of WordPress.com’s own blog post editor makes this use very straightforward. Instead of selecting categories, I just type them in a box and press the Add button. Since WordPress.com categories are also Technorati links, this categories-as-tags use made some sense. But I ended up with some issues, especially with standalone blog editors. Not only do most standalone blog editors have categories as selection items (which makes my typical tagging technique inappropriate) but the incredibly large number of categories on this blog makes it hard to use any blog editor which fetches those categories.
Not too long ago, WordPress.com added a tagging system to their (limited) list of supported features. Given my issues with categories, this seemed like a very appropriate feature for me to use. So the few posts I wrote since that feature became available have both tags and categories.
But what about all of those categories? Well, in an apparent effort to beef up the tagging features, WordPress.com added Category to Tag Converter. (I do hope tagging and categories development on WordPress.com will continue at a steady pace.)
This converter is fairly simple. It lists all the categories used on your blog and you can either select which categories you want to convert into tags or press the Convert All button to get all categories transformed into tags. Like a neat hack, it does what it should do. I still had to spend quite a bit of time thinking about which categories I wanted to keep. Because tags and categories perform differently and because I’m not completely clear on how tags really work (are they also Technorati tags? Can we get a page of tags? A tag cloud?), it was a bit of a shot in the dark. I pretty much transformed into tags most categories which I had only applied to one post. It still leaves me with quite a few categories which aren’t that useful but I’ll sort these out later, especially after I see the effects tags may have on my blogging habits and on my blog itself.
As luck would have it, this change in my blog may have as an impact a decrease in readership and an increase in comments. My posts might end up being more relevant for categories and tags with which they are associated. And I might end up having sufficiently few categories that I could, in fact, use blog editors on this blog.
While I was converting these categories into tags, I ended up changing some categories. Silly me thought that by simply changing the name of a category to be the same as the name of another category, I’d end up with “merged categories” (all blog posts in the category I changed being included in the list for the new categories). Turns out, it doesn’t really work like that and I ended up with duplicate categories. Too bad. Just one of those WordPress.com quirks.
Speaking of WordPress.com itself. I do like it as a blogging system. It does/could have a few community-oriented features. I would probably prefer it if it were more open, like a self-hosted WordPress installation. But the WordPress.com team seems to mostly implement features they like or that they see as being advantageous for WordPress.com as a commercial entity. Guess you could say WordPress.com is the Apple of the blogging world! (And I say this as a Macaholic.)
Just found out that WordPress.com has a new feature called AnswerLinks, which looks like it can simplify the task of linking to some broad answers. Like several other WordPress.com features, this one looks like it’s mostly meant as a cross-promotion than a user-requested feature, but it still sounds interesting.
Still, maybe the development of tag features is signalling increased responsiveness on the part of WordPress.com. As we all know, responsiveness is a key to success in the world of online business ventures.
12 Comments | tags: blog comments, blog editors, business models, categories, causality, determinism, egoticism, John C. Dvorak, macaholics, mailing-lists, meta-blogging, online communities, readership, responsiveness, reverse-SEO, self-promotion, SEO, statistics, tags | posted in Blogging, Cluetrain Manifesto, comment-fishing, Digital Life, linkfest, ramblings, shameless plug, WordPress.com