Shakespeare once said, through a character in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that experience is a jewel, and it had need be so, for it is often purchased at an infinite rate.
As teachers with experience to share, my blogger colleagues and I value each other’s teaching experience and share our reflections unreservedly. In April, we offered a workshop to share our vision and experience with regard to blogging. Entitled “Blog for Blog’s Sake”, the workshop was so well received that we are already planning another one for next year. Before that, in February, three of us had given a conference presentation entitled “Teacher Blogging as Social Constructivism”. Sharing our ideas and experience is so important to us that we aim at expanding our blogging community by encouraging others.
Students also need experience, of course, to get ahead: work experience, writing experience, and so forth. Everyone can learn from their own trials and errors, as well as those of others. Here are some more quotations on the importance of practical experience in life:
· Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience. Clarence Day
· Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. John Keats
· Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. Paulo Coelho
Oscar Wilde once cynically claimed that experience is simply the name we give our mistakes – yet to Albert Einstein, “the only source of knowledge is experience”. One cannot help agreeing more with the latter.
