I’ve recently experienced a relatively dramatic upsurge in enquiries for workshops relating to either photographing or processing. Simultaneously there has been a noticeable increase in visitors to this website. Finally and in some ways most surprising of all has been the growing realisation that many of those visitors have been reading these blog posts. I plan and think in words and pictures. I use diagrams and text to organise my thoughts (usually with pencil and paper) and while the blog has always been open, it has served as a way of enabling thinking rather than of specifically sharing or pontificating. I’ve been a subscriber to the principle of Social Constructionism for many years now. The core of this for me is the belief that learning, rather than a competitive process where the ‘best learner’ wins, is an undertaking that is best performed by a group. This may be a small study group or scaled to the whole of society/humanity. Simply, work together, share and we all learn more. In writing the above I am trying to make a point. When I write about what I have learned, it is to share that learning and perhaps facilitate the learning of someone else. It is explicitly not to demonstrate my learning, knowledge nor to advertise some form of mastery. Last week I wrote about installing Jetpack on this website. I'm not a high skills tech guru and it wasn't intended to be an evaluation, justification or even a recommendation. I don't know enough about either the product or the underlying technology to do any of those things. The writing was simply to share an experience. The growth of Social Media and of self publishing (in its many forms) has made it very easy to become an ‘expert’. There seem to be an ever increasing number of people who on Monday buy their first DSLR, by Wednesday are Photographers (With a Facebook business page) and by Friday have their own YouTube channel to disseminate their week long experience and expertise.Some of this relates to a future post on the difference between response and judgment and some relates to the concept of mastery. However the key element is that when I write I am sharing my learning rather than seeking to teach. I’m offering a personal perspective rather than an expression of what I consider to be an absolute truth. There are different truths out there for different people, even science is not absolute and shown so elegantly by Heisenberg and Schroedinger et al.