The “Zone of Proximal Development”

One thing I can guarantee the open source community:  If it understands at least the basics of the concept of  “the zone of proximal development” or ZPD (which, in general, public education does not), participation in open source will take off like a rocket.  It’s not complicated at all:  learning can only occur in that space where the learner can complete a task only with the assistance of an expert tutor (and that tutor need not be a person, but can, in fact, be a community).   That space is the zone of proximal development.  Eventually the learner can perform the task without assistance, and moves on to a higher level of expertise, resetting their ZPD if you will.  This is the basis of my pedagogy, and I let our results speak for themselves.  Two good places to start are Vygotsky’s Thought and Language (you can try Mind in Society, but it’s a little more challenging), and Binet’s The Development of Intelligence in Children.  Thought and Language is a short book, Binet’s is much longer, but you do not need to read the entire work to get his point- what we call “intelligence” is wholly subjective and a matter of the environment of the subject.  My colleague Matt Jadud of Allegheny College in PA also had several references with which I was not familiar and intend to grab. Matt, by the way, is a full fledged computer scientist (Ph.D and all) who took it upon himself to thoroughly expose himself to the learning theory literature to become a better professor. That leads us to another theoretical strain, one that deals with domain expertise and how one disseminates that expertise, that we will leave for later.

The open source world needn’t master a bunch of psychology terms to get the point:  all it has to do is draw students into the community. Once they are in the community, the community will teach them and they will learn.  But we need the same gentle entre that the profs were given this week:  we were welcomed and a path was made for us.  Yes, we had to exert effort, but exerting that effort was a lot of fun.

No, the open source community is not for everyone, but participation in it is extremely valuable for anyone seeking a career in info tech in any area (programming, project management, system admin, etc). I so fully immerses you in the domain of software development that your knowledge of every area of IT increases by orders of magnitude. Wonderful stuff!