Show Your Work

When it comes to new projects, we're learning that the process is almost as important as the final product. When we share that process, we all learn from each other.

When Aimee and I attended the ConfabEDU conference last month, one of our keynote speakers was Austin Kleon, (author of "Steal Like an Artist" and "Show Your Work" who is famous for his newspaper blackout poems).

Austin's talk centered on sharing your work — but not just the end product. His point: the process matters just as much as the product.

As part of a university, we are in a community of genius (which Austin called a "scenius"). We are all supposed to "be a node in the network," working toward the same goal — and being a part of a network means learning from each other and sharing our day-to-day triumphs and failures.

By sharing our processes and showing our work, we can all improve. That's why we're amping up our blog presence — it's a place for us to share lessons learned and show our work. After all, sharing our processes will hopefully help us all work more closely and easily, add more value to our work here, and make us better at it.

So, with the new year and new semester ahead of us, sharing is going to become embedded in our routine. We invite you to do the same.

Check out Austin's talk from ConfabEDU, and the meat of it starts around the 13:00 mark.