Re: Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
Years ago I attended a AAHE conference where the main theme was addressing the question of whether or not teaching skills should be part of the tenure review process.
Seriously.
It is actually a more complicated issue than many understand.
As to your question about active versus lurkers, my sense is htat there are a lot more lurkers than active participants. In some forums it is easy to see how many people visited a thread versus how many bothered to engage with a comment. (See the threads devoted to sharing images, for example.)
As to who can or should post — there’s no rule that says how much you should know or how much experience you should have in order to post. That being said, I do think it is worthwhile for newcomers to tread a bit lightly at first until they get a sense of how the community operates.
Lethimcook wrote:
gdanmitchell I completely agree. Ironically, the highest level of education is actually taught by professors who require no formal training in education. Very often the prestige of professors come from their research impact measured through bibliometric data. So when universities hire pedagogical proficiency and teaching ability are not necessarily the top-criteria. They just assume that if someone is an expert in a field that they automatically would be a good teacher. You also see this with retired NBA players who are world-class athletes, but end up not being able to translate such success in their coaching.
It feels like some are not fond of my thinking/writing out loud. Thinking out loud and journaling have tangible pedagogical benefits on cognitive learning. My doctoral supervisor advocated for speaking out loud because what sounds good in your head may actually sound awful once you speak it and verbally process it. Also if you speak or write publicly you get some funny reactions too if you truly had some awful ideas. And if you get responses, you can get a discourse, hopefully everyone learns something when we have discourse.
Slightly off topic:
This forum is of course full of people with tons of experience. I wonder what portion of this site's traffic come from those with accounts versus those who simply browse and lurk without an account. Anecdotally I visited and bookmarked over 100+ threads over the course of 12 months before I felt like joining in the conversation. Maybe Fred has some data.
I point this out because someone has mentioned that beginners would not benefit from my thoughts...there would certainly be a response bias in this thread since I believe the majority of users on this forum would not classify themselves at the 'beginner' level.
Aug 19, 2025 at 10:05 PM
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