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The ultimate guest speaker

A model for educator/practitioner collaboration

Josh Tenenberg

Institute of Technology

University of Washington, Tacoma

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Outline• The short story• How it all began• What we did• Industry Fellows: The Movie• What I got out of it• A general model• It’s about expertise!• But wait, there’s more (operators standing by)

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The short story

I paired with a practicing interaction designer from Google to teach an HCI course

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How it all began …

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What we did

• Buy-in from my faculty, administration, and advisory board.

• Three planning meetings in summer 2008.• Adam attended one of two class session per

week (Winter 2009).• Weekly debriefing/planning phone calls• I did all of the teacherly stuff. • Adam brought to class case studies from work• Regular crit sessions of student work

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The video

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What did I get out of it?

• Humbling: I was not the brightest bulb in the room concerning HCI.

• Increased domain knowledge.• Increased knowledge about the world of

professional practice.• Increased understanding of my teaching

choices

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The Industry Fellows Model

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Key Characteristics• Working together on curriculum review,

planning and delivery of a course related to the professional's expertise

• Division of labor to exploit what each does best

• Regular interaction between industry fellow, students, and teacher during academic term

• Sustainable time commitment for both faculty member and industry fellow

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It’s about expertise

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Periodic Table of ExpertiseBeer-mat Knowledge

Popular Understanding

Primary Source Knowledge

Interactional Expertise

Contributory Expertise

Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise, University of Chicago Press, 2007

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Tacit knowledge• Lots of expert knowledge is tacit

“those things we know how to do but are unable to explain to others.”

• Expert tacit knowledge is learned socially “mastery … cannot be gained from books … but can sometimes … be gained by prolonged social interaction with members of the culture that embeds the practice.”

Collins, “What is tacit knowledge” from The practice turn in contemporary theory, Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, von Savigny (Eds.), Routledge, 2000.

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Social learning

• Professional practitioners and teachers in the discipline have different contributory but overlapping interactional expertise.

• In Industry Fellows, we mutually socialize one another into our different practice communities.

• And, we each socialize students into our respective practice communities.

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Practitioners and higher-ed faculty inhabit different worlds

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… but we can bridge the gap

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Interested in participating?

• Stay posted at: http://depts.washington.edu/ifellows/

• Give me your name and email!

• NSF proposal to replicate under review

• I will continue regardless

• I have lots of advice if you roll your own

• I have a SIGCSE 2010 submission (see above URL)

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Photo references

• Google server farm photo: http://media.economist.com/images/columns/2008w10/ServerFarm.jpg

• UW Tacoma photo: www.djc.com/special/construct99/10d.jpg

• IU South Bend photo: http://www.campusexplorer.com/media/376x262/Indiana-University-South-Bend-D45F1365.jpg

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Thanks to …• Adam Barker• Students in TCSS 452, winter 2009• Orlando Baiocchi, Director of the Institute of Tech@UWT• UWT Institute of Technology Advisory Board• UWT Chancellor’s Fund: for replication and external eval• Tina Ostrander, Jessica Yellin, Bayta Maring, Julie Jacob

(consultants and Co-PI’s on NSF grant)• Jake Knapp and Beth Whitezel (Industry Fellows for

winter 2010)• Janet Ash (for the title)• Anonymous CCSC-NW reviewers

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