I think you should share work publicly before you get any feedback on it.
Let me be absolutely clear: I don’t think you should get any feedback on a piece of work until after you’ve shared it publicly.
I think you should publish your first draft, for everyone to see.
I think it’s dishonest to gather feedback before you share something. It’s cheating. You are deceiving your reader or listener or viewer or participant. You are not being truthful with them.
Your piece should truly allow another person to peak inside your head so that they can start to understand the world from your point of view.
Your piece of work is not just a thing that has a desired effect/impact/feeling/vibe/message/goal/whatever. It is also a marking of a moment of time: One more data point in the story of you and your practice, whatever that is— you are, even if you’re wrong, especially if you’re wrong, because it shares and shows the important details of how you got there— how you ended up getting through to where you eventually ended up, wherever that is.
In the past, I have yearned for higher quality feedback/advice because most of the feedback/advice I receive is useless boo hurrah stuff.
And when I wrote that blog post, Geoffrey Litt kindly offered me some higher quality feedback/advice. He said he finds he can get higher quality feedback/advice by privately/internally sharing a piece of work with someone, and asking them for some higher quality feedback/advice on that piece of work, before sharing it more widely.
And this does seem like a good idea. And I know that it does work.
However, I also feel resistant towards doing it, and I kinda ignored Geoffrey’s higher quality feedback/advice. And now I know why I’m resistant to it.
My desired approach is more in the spirit of digital gardening, which is what my wikiblogarden is partly named after.
In digital gardening, your work grows and is always visible: There isn’t a big moment where you finally reveal it in completed form: Everyone can see it happen over the passing of time.
And the whole process is recorded. I think that the visitor to your garden should be able to see all previous states of the garden: They should be able to replay the history of all the previous drafts of your work, because then they will understand how and why your garden grew as it did.
To fully embrace this approach, I hope to change my wikiblogarden so that you can easily see every single previous version of any blog post or page. Or maybe you could even see the process of how I typed it out in realtime.
My desired approach is also in the spirit of openness and open source. Work is shared freely, but not just the bundled/compiled/packaged product. No, the whole “source code” is shared, and the inner workings and history of how it’s built.
In the case of an essay or paper, the “source code” is all my notes, and rough drafts, and edits, and readings, and so on.
I think this is important for getting more people involved in academic work. We can’t just show them the shiny finished product at the end, because that’s too opaque. It’s too tricky to learn from an artifact alone. I don’t think it’s a good communication tool. It’s much more helpful to see a transparent breakdown, with all the dodgy bits included. Then you really get to see what’s going on, by stepping inside.
By the way, when I say “academia”, I’m also including the academish world in that, and para-academia, and all other academia-adjacent things too.
I think that academia should change. I think that we should all stop writing papers, or paper-like things, in the way we are currently doing it. And I think that academia should become entirely about growing open gardens instead.
Back to the wikiblogarden.