Write what you know. What a load of rubbish. “Write what you don’t know” (Ken Kesey wrote that), that’s more like it, if you want to be good at it.
But when you teach, you do teach what you know. That’s the way it seemed when we were children.
Once one has spent years, days and ticking seconds in classrooms and lecture halls and auditoriums, not to mention tense dining tables and rowdy restaurant booths, it’s obvious even very good teachers teach what they know so far.
When you consider lecturers (and preachers and pundits), you see living wizards of Oz, at various points of expertise.
My moments at a blackboard, whiteboard or screen — or just a stand with my notes on it — prove that at best, I also teach what I know so far, and sometimes folks learn.
At 9:15 Saturday morning, July 28, 2012, I will teach “Quick & Easy WordPress.com,” on the WordPress 101 Track at the 3rd annual WordCamp-Fayetteville.
UPDATE: The class has been presented, with people saying nice things about it. Lots of details, including Keynote/PowerPoint presentations, are at my WordCamp 101 page.
My presentation is described as:
The beginnings of a do-it-yourself, no-domain, free website. Templates, posts vs pages, and how to have a static home page, with the dynamic blog in a sidebar or not at all.”
The proposal the organizers accepted reads:
The session will cover the basics of using WordPress to create — for free — both blogs and conventional websites for personal and business projects. WordPress.com will be the basis of demonstrations to create a site then create individual pages and posts. WordPress.org details will be integrated into the presentation.
What do I “know so far”?
I am a WordPress enthusiast — paraphrasing my proposal — who’s found code projects as addictive as writing ones, just prefer the latter. I am Director of Online Media for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, run on the WordPress.org platform. I run the Ozark Poets & Writers Collective‘s site via WordPress.com I’ve worked on a few other sites. My Brick has resided at benpollock.com’s Mirthology: A Loose Leaflet since 2003; WordPress, of course.
The title I gave is “WordPress for Geniuses (in other fields).” Sure, it is a play on the Blankety-blank for Dummies series of books, but the point is people in other endeavors can create and maintain blogs — yet more than that, have a sophisticated website under your name or title of your enterprise. You can do fine ones at essentially no cost and with no more knowledge than sending email.
That actually is the starting point of WordPress, to let the programming and design specialists work their hearts outs for people like us to just click some buttons and bring our projects to life.
Check out what’s being offered at WordCamp Fayetteville 2012. It’s affordable. And all the cool kids will be there!
