To Kathy Sierra, about teaching

Hi !

I'm preparing SCWCD now, and i'm using the world famous book HFSJ.

First, allow me to say this book is really good, i cannot stop studying, that's great !

But my question here is directed to Kathy Sierra, about her teaching skills and methods.
I'm a XML/XSL/XSD instructor, and i'd like to know about the method you apply both in your trainings and books, because i'd like to learn about this, and apply on my own trainings.

And btw, is there any certification for this?

Thanks for any piece of information you'll accept to give me.

Cheers, (and congrats again for the book)
VK

Well, I had to come in and answer this one

Thanks for asking Esnault... some of our teaching methods are discussed in the front of the book, and I also have an article about it on my blog, which talks quite a lot about the techniques we use both in the book and in "live" classes.

I am just now reading a fantastic book on teaching--the best I've seen--called "What the best college teachers do." My other two favorite books on learning theory is Roger Schank's "Developing World Class E-Learning".

I reckon someone should probably move this thread to the teaching area, if you have more questions, I'll answer them there. There is no certification for this, although I give talks about some of it at various conferences.

Cheers and thanks for asking!
-Kathy

Thanks for the answer ! (Wow i had an answer from a world famous book author !)

I'll have a look at your blog, and if ever you participate in a talk in france, i'd be really happy to come and listen to you !

I saw the methods were introduced at the beginning of the book, but that was just enough to make me want to hear more and more

Thanks also for the books references.

Keep up the good work !
VK

PS: sorry for the bad place of my topic, it's true i didn't know where to put this one. I thought it'd be good in here, as every thing came from the reading of your book about SCWCD.

Moving this over to the Teacher's Lounge...

And by the way, Esnault, Kathy's blog is great for someone like yourself. I hope you'll learn from it and enjoy it as much as I have.

Kathy,

I could not quickly see it on your page:

Did you find a part time college teaching gig yet in Computers to test your ideas yet??

Also, I remember you talking once about your daughter's HS computer instructor/experience- how did she do?

JC

[ February 15, 2006: Message edited by: James Chegwidden ]
[ February 15, 2006: Message edited by: James Chegwidden ]

Howdy all -- thanks for the comments Marc : )

James -- I'm not sure what you mean by "testing", but yes -- we've done a decade of that. This actually all began out of a project I designed and taught for UCLA Extension, both on campus and the IBM New Media Lab. That was in the early-to-mid 90's. Until a couple of years ago, I'd been teaching using some variation of these principles for about ten years. And of course I used these ideas while teaching at Sun, etc. (although the students loved it, Sun did not... another story).

There are a large number of high schools, colleges/universities that teach with Head First books now in some form or another -- including Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland, etc. They are all doing it in their own way, though -- we never made an actual instructor's guide. So some are simply using the book as their text, but teaching in traditional ways, while we hear from other instructors who have designed highly interactive and dynamic classroom experiences around it. But it depends heavily on the teacher.

We consider Head First just *one* of a ton of possible implementations of brain-friendly learning principles -- definitely not the only one. The new book format I'm working on now could not be more different from Head First, but is still completely different from traditional text books. We've just rearranged the *weighting* of the different principles to serve a different learning goal.

I personally haven't taught Head First Java in a college, but Eric and Beth -- co-authors on HF Design Patterns and the authors of HF HTML have taught college Java courses using Head First Java (at Santa Fe College in New Mexico), and they did some really interesting things. Even their exams looked like the Head First books.

Anyway, it's less about our implementation ideas and much more about looking for ways to apply what is now known about the brain from a variety of domains including cognitive sciene, neurochemistry, psychology, game design, advertising, and entertainment. We believe it is the synthesis of what these folks know (especially the most recent work) that points to new and better learning experiences -- regardless of whether they are delivered in books, classrooms, online, etc.

It's certainly a lot of fun to explore : )

We believe that these things were not so important when people didn't need to learn so much and so quickly; less effective learning techniques were suitable thirty years ago. But today, the cognitive demands on most of us -- even outside tech fields -- are at a breaking point. We aren't living much longer, yet have to learn orders of magnitude more in our life span now than people did just a few decades ago. And there's no Brain 2.0 on the horizon, so learning experiences must be more effective and efficient. That's our philosophy, anyway.

Cheers!
-Kathy