How to improve your knowledge about something you think you know

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How many times you had an argument on a subject you think you knew? It happens so often. You think you know all about a subject - like a programming language, sales, soap opera, raising children - and boom! you suddenly realize you don't. In fact you realize some of the things you know are plain wrong.

So before you jump and say "You wanna bet?" you can improve your odds and knowledge on a subject quite easily.

Make a presentation

Presentation, slides? Isn't that for managers and wasting time? No, is not. Everybody should make some slides even if they will never present them. Putting together several slides on a subject may not sound like a big deal until you actually have to do it. Is like bringing order to chaos, like polishing something blurry until it shines.

I made several slides at some point because I was supposed to talk about those topics. The talk never happened but the experience helped me very much. Is not the same thing to know deep inside that you know about something and to prove that to a room full of people. People ask questions, comment, spot all the errors in a split second so you must know very good what are you talking about.

Example:

HTML5 is a collection of browser technologies, is not a single simple thing. So you can improve your knowledge of HTML5 in quite a few ways, by doing more than one presentation.

• The parts of HTML5
• New styles in CSS3
• New JavaScript APIs
• Basic JavaScript
• Advanced JavaScript

You can do lots of great presentation only on HTML5 related topics.

The great thing about a presentation is that it can be used later as the basis of a book, a report, an essay, a blog post series. Plus you can share your presentation with other people on sites like slideshare.net.

There's nothing wrong with knowing things at let the world know it.

Make a test

Just a series of 10-20 questions. Give 0 (bad), 1 (incomplete) or 2 (good) for the answer.

This is very useful when you need to know how much somebody knows about the subject. Of course how you make the test, what questions you ask, depends on you skill level. You shouldn't ask questions you don't know the answer for. You should not ask vague questions that can lead to arguments and contradictory discussions.

When you creating a good test, with clear questions and answers, it stays with you forever. Years later you still remember exactly each question and each answer.

Example:

In Java programming language, the first thing you learn is to print something on the screen using the following line of code:

System.out.println("Hello world!");

It might sound unbelievable, but most of the Java programmers don't know what 'System', 'out' and 'println' are. Just by asking them this simple question will tell you a lot about a Java programmer. Imagine what 20 question can do.