UC Berkeley DeCal Program
Instructor (Fall 1997 – Spring 98) Saltiness, Pluralism, Cal, and the Real World
Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP), UC Berkeley
Instructor: The Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche (Summer 1996 and 1997)
Program Mentor: School Year Program (Fall 1996 - Spring 1997)
Instructor: Programming in C/C++ (Summer 1995)
IDS 110
Graduate Student Instructor: Introduction to computers and Pascal programming (Spring 1995)
Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley
Graduate Student Instructor: General Chemistry (Fall 1994)
Graduate Student Instructor: Advanced Graduate Level Statistical Mechanics (Spring 1994)
Since my last formal classroom experience, I've been active in educating others through my writing, my talks, my modeling of work online, and through my occasional visits to the classroom.
I miss the classroom. While I was a Ph.D. student in biophysics at UC Berkeley, I did my share of teaching as a GSI, a graduate student instructor, in both the introductory level and advanced level disciplinary courses. (Because my research was deeply informed by theoretical chemistry, my instructional work began in chemistry.) I then had the pleasure of introducing undergraduates to the basics of computers after having to look beyond the Chemistry Department for teaching positions.
I had the good fortune (in retrospect) of having my graduate student researchship cut off -- leading me to ATDP, a program that brings K-11 students to campus from around the community. It was at ATDP where I really found my home intellectually and pedagogically. The first summer, I co-taught a C/C++ programming class that been created by someone else. It was an eye-openingly fun experience to interact with bright, energetic, but largely undisciplined teens. When I learned that I could propose a course of one's own design, my thoughts turned immediately not to re-teaching the programming class or to creating a class from my own discipline (though a biophysics class would have likely been a service to the program) -- but to thinking about what I truly passionately wanted to teach.
I decided to teach a worldviews class, which I entitled the "Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche" (NexusOfNewtonAndNietzsche). It's a long and complicated story about what motivated me, but some of the factors were:
-
As a teenager, I got a lot out learning to "think worldviewishly", to recognize the role played by big questions in our lives and our explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious presuppositions we carry around. There are not many opportunities to really think about these questions, especially not in a classroom setting.
-
I wanted to model how to think about complicated topics, even if one is approaching the topic as an amateur.
-
I wanted folks to learn how to read empathetically, if not sympathetically, especially with viewpoints that challenged one's own.
-
I wanted students to be able to formulate, pose, refine, and pursue questions of their own.
Teaching Nexus gave me a chance to learn about a teaching stance that I knew little about at the time. A big awakening came for me when I read Deborah Meier's Power of Their Ideas. The books that really helped me to translate a constructivist, question-based philosophy into the reality of classroom practice for me were Robert Fried's Passionate Teacher and John Bean's Engaging Ideas. (A lot more on my course is documented (or will be documented) at NexusOfNewtonAndNietzsche.
I also co-taught a "Preparing Yourself for the 21st Century" year-long class.
I did some work with pulling together a DeCal class: "Saltiness, Pluralism, Cal, and the Real World" It's a bit like NNN aimed at Christian undergraduate students. It would be interesting to reflect on the interplay of religious conviction, critical thinking, Bibliocal texts, culture wars, pluralism, diversity, the need to find one's way in the world.
No teaching per se in the Statistics department -- though I was in the business of helping to design software for undergraduate statistics.
When I started working for the InteractiveUniversity, I was involved with following teaching "mechanisms":
-
giving talks, which I always thought of teaching opportunities (CDL talk on RSS, etc). I would say that most people that I've seen give talks in my various professional settings don't see their talks as teaching opportunities. I do. How does that change the way that I speak? I'm very conscious of wanting to leave my audience with things that they can apply; I often talk about how I learned the subject matter so that my audience can better teach themselves. I also like to give talks about a general subject area and not just talk about my work directly.
-
teaching colleagues who work under my supervision. The first thing I've had to note is that my colleagues are my colleagues and not my students. So I've need to adapt my teaching stance to a workplace dynamic. The teaching is often more ad hoc(though it is possible and perhaps advisable to develep a longer-term strategy) and typically happens within the context of completing tasks.
-
teaching collagues in a seminar setting; the seminar I'm now creating to systematically teach the work of my profession. Because a lot of our work at the InteractiveUniversity is focused on innovation and research and development, we need to be more than the typical IT organization to be a ideas-driven, experimental, forward-looking group. Because of this orientation, an academic style seminar is what I believe is an ideal format to share and test ideas and proposals across the various distinct but overlapping threads of work at the InteractiveUniversity.
-
the annual visits to LloydNebres' class. Every summer, Lloyd invites me to lecture and run a class in his Advanced Internet course. It's such a joy to be in his class. The combination of coming back to familiar territory (of bright teens, high energy, youthful bravado and naivite) and the opportunity to introduce the cutting-edge issues of my own work to those who will pick up quickly) is irresistable to me. I've loved being the one who brings home real-world applications of XML and web services to this audience, challenging them to imagine uses that touch upon their own lives. There's also the extra thrill of trying to hold their attention. If they get bored and don't care what you say, they would make that known.
-
the use of wikis/weblogs for teaching. I have worked assiduously to document the thought process behind my work, providing not only the conclusions, and the reasoning process behind the conclusions (which is standard in academic writing) -- but also my own questions and confusions and methods I used to teach myself the background I needed to do the work in the first place. (See, for example, the long essay I wrote about FiguringOutRdf.) I have borrowed the term PersonalKnowledgePublishing to describe this process. Sometimes, this process requires being open with one's ignorance. There are plenty of half-baked assertions in my wiki. But that is one of the big points of writing on a wiki for me: modeling an openess to changing my thoughts on a subject.
How is this applicable?
I would like to get in the business of mentoring and teaching undergraduate and graduate students in my own discipline. I've certainly had a broad range of teaching experience, working with a big range of ages and subject matter and contexts. I've said that the seminal teaching experience for me has been that of ATDP, a time in which I was able to take an inquiry driven approach. I like to believe that an inquiry-based approach can be used effectively in undergraduate and graduate settings, even ones with large classes and a huge amount of material to absorb, ones that have traditionally been delivered by lecture. I am also looking forward to experimenting with using the web-based collaboration tools and "social software" (as well as learning management systems) to create a learning and teaching environment. I've had a lot of experience writing on the Web and creating tools for interoperability among systems. Hence, it will be intriguing to apply that knowledge to the new teaching contexts, especially with students who are studying the medium itself.
An expanded teaching listiing (written in March 1996) -- to be updated
University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. (Academic and Talent Development Program) Instructor, The Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche (to be taught Jun.-Aug., 1996)
-
Course Description
-
currently developing an original course for teaching high school students the theory and practice of "worldview analysis."
-
attempting to teach students about the life of scholarship, including independent, interdisciplinary scholarship
Virtually every aspect of modern life displays the fingerprints of world views, which permeate not only the humanities and arts but also the study of science and technology. In this course, we will tackle some of the "big questions" such as "Who are we as human beings? What is truth? How do we know anything at all? Is morality a matter of opinion?" Although these questions may seem to be removed from daily life, world views -- our answers to these basic questions -- profoundly influence how we think and what we do, even without our conscious awareness. In this course, we will work on becoming more conscious of world views -- our own and those of others. We will take a historical look at some of the great world view systems, concentrating primarily on how dominant world views are manifest today. Many hotly debated social and personal issues are actually conflicts about the big questions. We will brush for the fingerprints of world views using specific examples ranging from traditional essays, newspaper articles, PBS documentaries, political speeches to advertisements, movies, and rock videos.
The class will be run primarily as a seminar, supplemented by lectures. We will focus on reading texts critically, conducting detailed research, sharing our findings through essays and oral presentations, and learning through open discussion.
University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. (Academic and Talent Development Program) Instructor, Introduction to C/C++ Programming (Jun.-Aug., 1995)
-
taught the theory and practice of good programming in C/C++ to 30 gifted teenagers (mostly high school students)
-
developed curriculum for the teaching of C++ by having the students program two games (an adventure and a video game)
-
introduced students to concepts in object-oriented programming
-
supervised class projects for 15 students
-
dealt with disparities in background preparation by splitting the class into two streams
University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Computers and Pascal programming (Jan.-May, 1995)
-
taught basic Pascal programming to undergraduates who were computer novices
-
taught word processing, spreadsheets, applications, and database use
-
supervised class projects for 20 students
University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. Teaching Assistant, Freshman General Chemistry (Aug.-Dec., 1994)
-
taught chemistry to 30 (mostly) first year non-chemistry major students
-
supervised and graded chemistry experiments in labs
-
graded lab reports and exams
-
ran weekly discussion sessions
University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. Teaching Assistant, Advanced Graduate Statistical Mechanics (Jan.-May, 1994)
-
graded problem sets in advanced statistical mechanics for a class of graduate students in chemistry and chemical engineering
-
held weekly office hours
Besides these formal teaching experiences, I have done the following:
-
trained fellow graduate students to program better in FORTRAN, to use the UNIX systems more effectively, and to perform three-dimensional computer graphics visualization (1991-1997)
-
tutored a teenaged boy from a recently immigrated Eritrean family (for several months) through Harbor House in Oakland (1991?--I cannot remember the exact dates anymore.)
-
tutored many classmates as an undergraduate in the Engineering Science program (1986-90)
-
worked as a student computer consultant for Ontario Hydro (summer, 1989)
-
tutored fellow classmates in virtually every academic subject throughout my high school life (1982-86)
