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Hm. So that was what Tacit knowledge meant. Reflecting back, I remember a time when my cousin was recommending that I do part-time work as a tutor. I was thinking, “What would I teach?” The first subject that came to mind was math, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about teaching it. I only actually passed my math courses using two to three formulas and those things are abstracts inside my head that I couldn’t explain. My methods weren’t the same as my teachers and there was a time that my dad, an indignant engineer who would not accept a daughter’s failure at math, went to my teacher and told her that she shouldn’t fail me just because my solutions (or lack thereof) weren’t the same as hers. They made us memorize theorems and I never did. There are even times when the solutions on my head were difficult to put on paper because they were not the way my teachers solved math problems. I had a completely different way of solving things, like I would use a trigonometry formula to derive a solution for some analytic geom or stat question. (Yes, I know, it’s weird that I used a trig formula to acquire stat answers, which is supposedly a completely different field from trig.)

This is what I now understand as tacit knowledge. Try as I might, I never could translate the process with which those numbers came into being. Even Sir Dennis (Berino, my QUAMET prof) would try to convince me to learn how to use Excel for solving stuff, but for some reason, I find Excel quite a tedious piece of software to use — you have to go about solving stuff in such a long, roundabout manner, when your brain can process the piece of information faster.

This also happened at work. During my early 20s, I leave the program-logic formulation to my then boyfriend, who could translate my ideas into writing. It wasn’t until I began working at Level Up! that I was forced to put to use all the stuff I supposedly learned from BSIM. I guess this is what you can call Explicit-Tacit — the process of internalization. I had to internalize program-logic formulation, in order to externalize my tacit knowledge. Wow, I just went full circle. Heh.

Now designing is poles apart from math. I noticed that what I have in my head doesn’t come out quite that right when I put them together in Photoshop. Although I wouldn’t think that many of my designs are ugly, they just come out…well…different. Another tacit-explicit mistranslation?

Ironically, I notice that I could translate back end to front end quite capably. From the programmer’s ideas to the user’s experience. It’s either I’m just good at translating concepts that aren’t mine or my brain’s just too twisted to be translated properly…by me or anyone.

More thoughts on these on the Individual Activity…