Teaching and Training


| Resume | Leadership | Practical Experience and Service | Teaching and Training |
| Information Technology | Scholarly Argument | Professional Document | Miscellanea |


Contents


It's all about Edutainment

          Being a child raised on Sesame Street, The Electric Company and Schoolhouse Rock, I'm a firm believer in the value of educational activities that are not just cut and dry facts, but an all around entertaining and informative experience. Most of this is just an aspect of my personality that loves to perform, and some of it is that I don't like going to boring presentations. Why should anyone else have to suffer that horrible fate?

          So, what makes a valuable edutainment experience? 1) Where the instructor is fully prepared and knowledgeable about the topic being covered in the classroom, 2) Where there is sufficient documentation and assistance to help take up the slack when the instruction is moving too quickly for certain individuals, 3) Where the instructor has fun with the subject and 4) where the students walk away knowing that they've accomplished something and can do it again. In my experiences as a teacher and trainer I have tried to fulfill these four obligations to the students.

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Working With, Not Teaching At

          One more critical component of my teaching philosophy is that I firmly believe that the most valuable learning situations are those where the instructor isn't the authoritarian expert who must be obeyed, but someone the students work with. The reference experience is a collaborative learning environment. The same thing can and should happen in the classroom.

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The ASIS&T HTML Workshop Series

          My involvement with the ASIS&T technology workshop series began when I volunteered to teach a session of the "Technology Bootcamp" for incoming MLIS students. The purpose of the bootcamp was to give incoming students a general introduction to the vast array of technology available at the information school as well as to provide a baseline competency for first quarter classes. The series was four days long and 3.5 hours of lectures and lab exercises each day. I volunteered to develop the content for Session 4 on web technology, search engines, and HTML. I was provided with an outline of necessary topics to cover, but other than that I was free to explore and develop as much as I chose to do. After the bootcamp I had received a large number of responses for work on a more advanced level. This prompted me to develop a full set of three workshops with my own design and my own content.

          In these introductory workshops the students and the instructor would write code together, so that everyone was working together. Over the course of the intermediate classes I tried to have more discussion about what we were trying to accomplish by using different pieces of code, and in the advanced class we had a "Fix this Code" exercise where we worked with a complicated webform, a PERL program that generated an email message, and an HTML response page. This particular exercise drew on the knowledge from the two previous sessions.

          In order to develop as a teacher you have to know where you're coming from, and where you need to go. To do that you need some form of evaluation tool. To evaluate my lessons and my teaching style I used this evaluation form. This was based on a generic evaluation form that everyone who taught bootcamp used. Overall my results were usually in the Excellent category. To see a comparison across the three different times that I taught the Basic HTML class you can look at this evaluation page. Most often I would receive strongest criticism that my pace was too fast for people. I believe that a lot of this feeling stemmed from the fact that a) I tend to type quickly, b) I tend to speak quickly (especially if nervous), and c) there was usually a lot of material for the length of the class period.

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Seattle Central Community College: Library Workshops

          My experience at Seattle Central was radically different, partly because of my official capacity as an employee of the library. In this environment I was no longer among my peers, but thrown into the position of authority. So, in order to follow my beliefs in edutainment and working with. I had to develop classes that suited my style of teaching. Part of the way the Library at Seattle Central accomodates working with the students is through their "collage" workshop method. Here, the students are divided into groups and given a task to locate a resource in the library (in this class it was different types of reference books), answer a few questions about the resource, and then present their findings to the rest of the class. Thus the students take a more active and prominent role in the learning process, and the Librarian becomes a facilitator of the discussion adding necessary information when needed.

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What I've Learned About Teaching

  • The amount of time that you should spend in order to teach a really great class is at least 3-5 hours of preparation per hour of presentation. This does not include writing handouts which can take a long time.

  • As much as you like to talk you need to give the students time to talk as well. The longer you talk, the less they listen.

  • Vary the kind of work that happens in the class, and give the students a good amount of hands-on time.

  • No one should ever leave confused. If they do something went wrong.

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© 2002, Eric S. Riley
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