been in the trade over 17years. Gas qualified for 14.
i know people that have been in the trade for 40plus years who you would not want to work in your house and seen a 1st year apprentice do excellent work unsupervised. knowlege and experience is important but its how you use it that counts i guess.
Its not a good feeling when your relise that you dont relate to your aprentice and make him turn the volume down on the radio.
Fuzzy mentioned earlier that its the value of experience that counts. AWheating talks about 'knowledge and experience' - both are right.
But, experience, is dependent on 'meaning', if we are going to consider it in light of 'knowledge'.
We then have the problem of knowledge, which is not straight forward. For example, there is language knowledge, which is that described or communicated in language. This is also referred to as 'codified knowledge', abstract knowledge or propositional knowledge - all these terms are roughly the same and refer to knowlege that can exist without experience - it can be described in language - like siphonage, like venturi, like dezincification. Hence professional knowledge becomes a technical language, and can be written, and tested in colleges.
The down side to the above is that knowledge can be communicated, learned and tested, without 'meaningful understanding' on the part of the student.
Hence with this type of knowledge, understanding is suspect. The process of communicating this knowledge in teaching is referred to 'transmission' and has been found to be a very poor way of helping people to understand something. In addition, if this propositional knowledge is remembered (without understanding), it is quickly forgotten - this is also referred to as surface learning - this might explain something to those who teach.
So when does an experience become meaningful, and how does this relate to knowledge. Well most of our knowledge that we remember were 'meaninful events', those which were understood through a transactional process - actions were present.
So we can start to see why people prefer to learn in a practical way, and why this sort of knowledge is very powerful, in terms of us developing it.
However, 'doing' knowledge is not regarded in the same way as language knowledge, the latter is elvated, which dates back to the Greeks, and their 'academia'.
'Experience' alone is meaningless.
