Teaching

Instructor Positions

Courses part of year-long professional development activity for librarians (public, school & university) aimed at teaching design and technology skills. Focused on student projects. Solely responsible for developing and teaching all materials.

Introduction to User Experience Design, Rapid Iterative Methods, Rapid Prototyping, User Testing, Personas, Scenario-Based Design
Hands on workshop: students developed personas for their project, and then ran a quick user test

Hands-on workshop introduction to Paper Prototyping, completed at least 2 interface iterations

Workshop introduction to community outreach for librarians to build support for library activities.

Entrepreneurial IT Design - LIS490IT Spring (January - May) 2011

Co-Instructor of Record: With other co-instructor, responsible for all aspects of teaching the course, including developing course materials/syllabus, teaching/lecturing, and grading.
Course Description: Introduces students to a range of rapid prototyping techniques and methods to analyze needs, opportunities and design spaces. Students will work in teams to develop ideas for novel computational devices or applications to meet identified needs. Covers the interlinked entrepreneurial skills of identifying an unmet need, exploiting technological opportunities, exploring a design space to refine an idea, and communicating a design vision through demonstrations with prototypes and proofs of concept. This enables developers to show how their envisaged working interactive technology will be used productively in a particular real-life context. Communicating the vision of computational devices is a challenge because dynamic use in context is hard for people other than the device's developers to imagine. The ability to produce convincing, clear, powerful demonstrations even at the early stages of a project is a highly valuable entrepreneurial skill, and also highly applicable within an organization.

Web Technologies and Techniques - LIS390W1A Fall (Aug. - Dec.) 2013, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007

Instructor of Record: Solely responsible for all aspects of teaching the course, including developing course materials/syllabus, teaching/lecturing, and grading.
Course Description: This course provides an introduction to the technologies behind the Web. Topics covered include: hypertext, hypermedia, the history of the Web, the role of Web standards and their impact on the development of Web resources. The course introduces principles of Web design and usability. Students will gain an understanding how the Web works and how to design, construct, evaluate, and maintain Web-based materials.

Social Aspects of Information Technology - INFO202 Spring (January - May) 2013

Teaching Assistant: Led weekly discussion section, led one full-class lecture, fully responsible for grading and providing personalized feedback to students. Teaching styles used included lecturing, group work, and fostering discussion.
Course Description: This course introduces students to the field of Social Informatics. Social Informatics analyzes interactions among people and information/communication technologies (ICTs). This includes attention to a range of social, political and economic issues from the individual to societal levels. The class also explores the effects of different social and technical contexts on the creation and use of information/communication technologies. Issues covered in this class include: basic concepts of social systems, ICTs, and their interactions; uses of mobile information technology devices (such as cell phones, smart phones, and tablets); online interaction and virtual community; information technology and work; and laws and policies related to information technologies. This class serves as one of the three required core courses for the UIUC Informatics Minor.

Museum Informatics - LIS490MU Spring (January - May) 2014, 2012, 2010

Teaching Assistant: Assisted with developing the syllabus, teaching/lecturing, grading, and personalized feedback. The course was an online distance education course, thus helped students with technical support and supplemented lecture with backchannel communications. Engaged students in forum discussions.
Course Description: Covers information organization and access in museums, exploring the relationship between information technology and modern museum environments. Students learn about classification systems for museums, computer systems for information storage and retrieval, universal access to shared electronic data, copyright in the digital world, virtual museums, interactive exhibits, and information management in museums, through lectures, computer-based activities, and interactive discussions. The final project involves design of an electronic portfolio of virtual museum resources. Students are encouraged to approach class topics from their individual backgrounds in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences. There will be additional assignments required of graduate students.

The Floyd Solution, New Orleans, LA: May 2002 to April 2003; Cambridge, MA: Sept. 2001 to Jan. 2002.

Private Tutor.

Instructed clients of various backgrounds, including home-schooled high school, undergrad, and grad level students.
Subjects taught include: math of various levels including calculus; written and verbal English—including pronunciation, slang, improving a client’s accent, grammar, reading comprehension, literature, writing skills, essay writing and vocabulary; American history; American culture; and GED, SAT, GRE, GMAT and Citizenship test preparation. Instructed clients in both learning skills and test-taking skills.
Provided introductory lessons in Windows, MS Office, the internet and web-browsing, and simple customization and maintenance of personal machines to novice computer users.
Provided consultation on business school applications and essays for top MBA programs.

Boston University, Metropolitan College, Boston, MA: Aug. 2001 to Jan. 2002.

SAT, GRE Tutor.

Instructed classes of 20-35 students in Verbal, Math, Analytic, and test-taking skills for the SAT & GRE.
Used an interactive format and structured the classes to cover the maximum amount of material while keeping the class focused on the areas where the students felt they needed the most work.
Approached lessons by keeping in mind the perspective of the students so as not to overlook details important to the understanding of the material.
Included emphasis on test-taking skills and strategies, and on familiarizing students with the format of the test.
Developed strong presentation, organizational and interpersonal skills while maintaining classroom discipline.