Learn in Public

From Individual Discovery to Collective Intelligence

Picture this: You’re struggling to understand how human memory works. Mid-explanation to a friend, you say: “… kind of like when we tried to piece together that party from last year: you remembered the music, I remembered the cake, Sarah remembered who was there. None of us had the full memory, but together it all came back…” Then it hits you. That might just be how the brain remembers, not stored in a single location, but distributed across a vast neural network. You just understood in 30 seconds what hours of reading couldn’t clarify.

Now, why does explaining in the open unlock insights that studying alone never could? The answer reveals something remarkable about how knowledge is built.

The Teaching Paradox

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman believed that true understanding meant being able to explain complex ideas simply. His colleague David Goodstein recounted how Feynman once said about explaining a complex physics concept: “I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it" ¹. This philosophy, that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t truly understand it, became the foundation for what we now call the “Feynman Technique.” However, the systematic four-step technique commonly attributed to him appears to be a modern construction based on his general approach ²rather than something he explicitly formulated.

The technique involves: choose a concept, explain it as if teaching a sixth-grader, identify knowledge gaps, and simplify further. While this method is sound, I propose adding one crucial step that amplifies its benefits for everyone: document your learning journey and share it publicly.

Traditional learning: You’re learning how LLMs choose the next token. You write an explanation on paper, pretending to teach it to an imaginary sixth-grader: “The AI looks at all possible words and picks the most likely one based on what it learned during training.” You realize you don’t understand the probability calculation, study more, and refine your explanation. The learning remains private.

Learning in public: You follow the same process but document and publish that explanation on your blog, explicitly noting your confusion about the probability calculation. Now the magic happens: a machine learning engineer comments with a clearer explanation, someone shares a helpful visualization, and a student asks a question that reveals another gap. Your learning becomes collaborative.

The difference? When you teach to an imaginary audience, learning stops with you. When you learn publicly, knowledge spreads and grows within learning communities ³, transforming individual understanding into collective intelligence.

Discovering Learn in Public

As I developed this concept while writing this post, I initially called it “public learning.” But in the spirit of the practice itself (openly documenting my learning journey), I discovered I wasn’t the first to explore this territory. Shawn Wang (swyx) ⁴had already articulated a framework called Learn in Public ⁵that captured much of what I was describing. This discovery exemplifies the principle I’m exploring: by working through ideas openly, I found existing wisdom that sharpened my understanding. I’ve adopted the term Learn in Public, building on this foundation while adding my perspective and contributions. I’ll use the more natural phrase learning in public when it fits better in context, but both refer to the same core idea.

Learn in Public is the practice of deliberately documenting and sharing your learning process in real-time, creating openly accessible knowledge artifacts that benefit both your understanding and the broader learning community.

The Research Foundation

Learning in public’s effectiveness is backed by converging research findings that explain why this approach transforms individual learning into collective intelligence.

The foundation starts with the act of teaching itself. Research shows that both preparing for and actually teaching academic content significantly enhance learning outcomes ⁶. When you prepare to teach material publicly, you engage in more sophisticated cognitive processing than private study requires. The more complex the teaching activity, the more opportunities to learn by teaching ⁷, and public documentation is inherently complex, requiring you to anticipate questions, structure information clearly, and fill knowledge gaps you might otherwise ignore.

This enhanced processing leads directly to improved retention. Weinstein et al. showed ⁸that bringing information to mind directly improves memory for that information, and public documentation forces continuous retrieval and reorganization of knowledge. Unlike traditional teaching in a classroom, learning in public makes this process transparently visible and persistently accessible, creating artifacts that serve as both personal reference and community resource.

But the real magic happens at the community level. Learning in public transforms individual study into systematic knowledge documentation where learners acquire life skills along with subject matter ⁹while creating resources others can build upon. Knowledge sharing contributes to success ¹⁰through positive impacts on creativity, learning, and performance. The public dimension creates what educational research terms learning communities ³where participants experience higher retention rates, with belonging and support contributing to increased persistence and success.

Perhaps most importantly for our digital age, documenting learning creates knowledge graphs that significantly promote collaborative knowledge building, group performance, and social interaction ¹¹. Each concept you explain becomes what researchers call a semantic node ¹²in a broader knowledge network. These artifacts must be machine-readable to maximize impact, just as search engines need to understand your content to rank it effectively, your learning artifacts need proper structure, clear terminology, and semantic markup (like a Wikipedia page the internet links to). This makes them discoverable by indexers so both humans and AI agents can find them. This is commonly known as search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s more than that: by properly linking and annotating your writing, you ensure your knowledge contributions integrate into the expanding web of human understanding.

When you learn in public, you’re improving your own understanding while participating in the collaborative construction of knowledge itself.

Semantic Public Learning

While Learn in Public provides the foundation, I’ll show you in my next post in this series how we can enhance it further with what I call Semantic Public Learning by adding academic rigor and machine-readability to maximize both personal learning and collective knowledge building.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, or Medium to be the first to know and see Semantic Public Learning in action. You can also have a look at the Semantic Public Learning project page, it serves as a living document that tracks the journey as it develops. For easy integration, you can also add the RSS feed of that page, or the RSS feed of my blog, to always stay up to date without the need for a social media account. Comment below, share your perspectives, and help make it the interactive process it’s meant to be. Your questions and insights often become the catalyst for my next learning breakthrough.

Remember: every expert was once a beginner who learned in public.

See you in the comments!