The ultimate guest speaker
A model for educator/practitioner
collaboration
Josh Tenenberg
Institute of Technology
University of Washington, Tacoma
CCSC-NW 2009
Outline
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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
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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 Expertise
Beer-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/S
erverFarm.jpg
• UW Tacoma photo:
www.djc.com/special/construct99/10d.jpg
• IU South Bend photo:
http://www.campusexplorer.com/media/376x262/IndianaUniversity-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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This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License. To view a copy of this license, visit
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