Step one: mentoring

[Paul Callaghan]

Hi

There's some interest in getting some (technical) mentoring activity
going in the region, and it's a good place to start if you're wanting
to do other kinds of teaching, so here goes.

I propose we try to get together some experienced teachers and some
people interested in doing some mentoring, around the end of March,
to share practical ideas and experiences - and maybe get something
more concrete in motion.

To this end, please reply soon if you'd like to take part and outline
briefly what your interest & experience is. When I have an idea of
numbers, I'll try to pick some dates.

Some more detail follows.

Basically, by mentoring I mean informal help such as constructive
criticism on code, advice on how to develop certain skills,
demonstration of techniques, a sounding board for mad ideas, ...
Think back to what you could have done with when trying to learn
something technical.

There's nothing too hard about mentoring: just a bit of spare time,
some knowledge or skills to pass on, and an ability to discuss ideas.
You don't have to know everything (few people do) - just as useful is
to know your limits and not try to b*llsh*t too much. Sometimes just
a wider experience is just as valuable as specific knowledge, eg
knowing how to approach kinds of problems - or even just to provide
a sympathetic ear.

It can be very rewarding to help others learn, on several levels. Fun
as they explore new ideas, quite often you learn new things too, and
it can lead to interesting collaborations. You'll often find that
explaining something helps you understand it in more depth as well.

I'd like to get some experienced teachers together to share their
experiences about this kind of teaching, giving tips and techniques etc
to people who want to try mentoring others. Let's aim for a 1 or 2 hour
informal Q&A session.

We also need some discussion of practicalities, eg how to match people to
mentors, how to avoid some sneaky student getting 20 mentors to do his
or her homework, what responsibilities to expect.

I don't expect people to put huge amounts of time in (I won't) or do it
completely for free (my wife says no), so how about some kind of ladder
system? Ie, I would be happy to help X if s?he helps Y and they help Z.

Sound interesting?

Paul

[paulcc]

I'm in, of course.

What I can cover: mainly my experiences from supervising around 90
students on individual projects over the years, from small undergrad
projects up to PhDs. A lot of this is about finding relevant
interests, setting realistic short- and mid-term goals, working around
interesting problems, and developing relevant technical skills. For
the record, this is perhaps the aspect of teaching I miss most - for
reasons including the chance to do new and interesting stuff, and the
great things students achieved. My first steps into Rails came about
after persuading a final year student to do his website with it (and
he got great marks for it too).

Paul

[paulcc]

Someone I spoke to used the phrase "mentoring evenings", which lead to
the following suggestion of one possible approach:

People with technical problems/issues and those willing to help (not
necessarily distinct sets) meet in a reasonable number one evening.
The former write brief details of post-its and stick them on a
suitable wall. Someone groups these into related areas, and starts to
match issues to relevant people. Then, man the laptops.

Worth a try?

Paul

[paulcc]

Hi

In an attempt to catch more people, I suggest we have a brief get-
together before this month's SuperMondays rather than organise a
separate session elsewhere.

Let's congregate at 5:45pm next to the sandwiches, probably moving to
the main room if there's enough of us.

It will be an informal discussion on how we get started, and anything
else relevant.

Hope some of you can make it.

Paul

[James Smith]

There have been various events on locally where mentoring has taken place... A good example was the Young Rewired State hack week that happened in the summer. I was there for a couple of days (sadly not the full week), flying the flag for the company and helping out with the mentoring. Another example would be the Imagine Cup, some people from work are mentoring and some of the placement students we have are also taking part. they're supposed to be pitching their ideas at NEBytes this coming Wednesday!

 

My employer spends time and effort on what they call "Corporate Social Responsibility"  We as a company are in a position to give something back to the community and I'd like to think our efforts make a difference!

--

James

[paulcc]

Hi

Since Supermondays has been cancelled, let's try this at the
Supermonday in April

I've not had much more interest in mentoring since last month, so
maybe we should press on with discussions of workshops, and see how
that goes? I'll send an email about this later.

Paul

[paulcc]

HI James

Interesting - Thanks for this.

Paul

[Morna Simpson]

Hi All,

A quick note to let you know that we are adding a voucher system for folks who want to teach using FlockEdu.

You need to apply by email to me to get a voucher - mo...@flockedu.co.uk

It will allow you to bypass paypal for 6 - 12 months so that you don't have to pay a subscription fee when you first join… but you will still be able to sell tickets to your classes.

Its only open to folks who are interested in being teachers during our Market Testing phase.

I hope this encourages some of you to get involved.

Cheers
Morna

[Morna Simpson]

Hi Guys,

Many thanks again to Paul for keeping this thread up and running.

I thought it was about time that I gave you some updates about FlockEdu based on the feedback I've had over the past few weeks.

Firstly, you should be aware that Marketing Pages are coming soon which will explain how FlockEdu works in detail. If there is anything you are unsure of please drop me a mail and I can ensure I cover those things in the Marketing Pages - or in the Q&A for other users. 

I think we need around 10 folks to be involved in a 'Disciplinary Cluster',  and to have an agreed Launch Date  for the system to work properly and so that I can ensure the outreach to students is successful and  classes are full. So far i think we have around 5 people who are keen and committed - but it would be good to know if there are more of you as the bigger the cluster the better the chances of having a successful first round. 

As a thank you for being the first people involved I would like to find ways to give you privileges within the system. I'd like you to think about what kinds of privileges you might hope to have. The first thing we are doing is putting a 'voucher system' in place that will enable you to bypass the Subscription Fee for at least a year (others will be paying £15 pm as our starter offer).  You will still need to input Paypal details so that you will still be able to charge for the tickets for your classes. 

The voucher system will be manual at first so please get in touch with me by email at mo...@flockedu.co.uk if you would like one of these vouchers.

For the teaching cluster to work well it will help if we are teaching related subjects. So it would be useful for me to have as much detail as possible about what you would like to teach so that I can start to follow this up with target student groups and put some cash into advertising for it. 

Another disciplinary cluster that I am beginning to look at is Medicine - so if you have any contacts there I would be really grateful if you passed on my details - or got back to me with some introductions. 

I hope to coordinate a date at the end of this month to come down to Newcastle again and it would be great to meet up with any of you who are keen to be involved. I'll drop everyone a doodle poll to see what dates work best. 

As you might expect the feedback I have recieved has raised a lot more questions and I have put them together at the end of this mail. I would really appreciate it if you could send me your thoughts on these. Don't worry if you can't answer all of them - an indication of what folks are thinking here and there really helps build a picture…. *and* the sooner you can reply the sooner I can action them.

Many thanks

Morna//

_________________________________________________________

SUMMARY

1/ I've had good feedback about the following potential student groups

a. CPD for Primary & Secondary teachers

b. CPD for Ad agencies wanting to turn digital

c. Portfolio classes for younger adults

d. Access courses for university/ college for younger adults

Q: Which of the above do you think are relevant to your teaching?

Q: Are there other groups I should look at? 

Q: Do you know of specific people/ organisations I should talk to who have access to any of these communities? 

Q: Do you have any ideas about where specifically I should advertise to reach appropriate student groups?

2/ I am in the process of identifying some good venues for Teaching in. 

a. The Old Post Office

b. The Central Bean Cafe (the Gallowgate)

c. The Community School that Mark Semple teaches in (I still need to identify this)

Q: Are there other venues which you are familiar with and would like to use?

3/ So far the classes I know folks are interested in teaching are broadly

a. Web Skills inc  Django HTML, CSS & Javascript

b. Drawing and animation

c. Data Visualisation 

Q: Have I got this right?

Q: Have there other things you'd like to teach? If so what would you like to teach?

(NB i'd like to have around 10 folks involved in teaching so it would be good to have a few more folk on board)

4/ I am working out a schedule that I think would be feasible so that we can make the classes a success

My experience of this is that you need circa 3 months to organise a series of events, 2 months lead time to make contact with potential students/ organisations and 6 weeks advertising push through blogs emails and other media. This would mean a start date in teaching of around the 1st of June. 

Q: Does the end of May sound like a feasible date to start advertising the classes

Q: Does June sound like a feasible date to start classes?

Q: Will too many folks be on holiday - does this clash with other arrangements? 

Q: What alternative dates would you suggest?

N.B. I can also pass this by the target student groups to get feedback on what would suit them 

5/ There are some experienced teachers amongst you but others have indicated that they are interested in teaching but lack confidence in their teaching skills. 

Q: Would you be interested in holding classes in Teaching Skills?

Q: would you be interested in learning teaching skills? 

Please let me know numbers if you can of both. I may be able to arrange for some friends to come down to Newcastle to teach specific skills if this would help. It would be great to know your thoughts on this. 

6/ A few of you suggested running Taster Sessions to get an indication of interest and competency levels.

At the moment I am looking at making this possible for folks with special privileges within the system. Please note that these privileges will be for those folks i know are committed and have spoken to about this - but I am more than happy to hear from people who are interested in talking to me about this.

Q: How many Tasters would you want to run to gauge interest in a course?

Q: Should these be tied to the course you are planning on running? (i.e the same venue etc)

Q: Should there be an upper limit on the number of folks attending? 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

On 26 Mar 2012, at 11:18, paulcc wrote:

[paulcc]

> For the teaching cluster to work well it will help if we are teaching related subjects. So it would be useful for me to have as much detail as possible about what you would like to teach so that I can start to follow this up with target student groups and put some cash into advertising for it.

I've started two threads in this group to collect this info - and to
see if there's gaps in what we can offer.

> I hope to coordinate a date at the end of this month to come down to Newcastle again and it would be great to meet up with any of you who are keen to be involved. I'll drop everyone a doodle poll to see what dates work best.

We might coordinate this with a brief meetup before the next
Supermonday event. (Note - last month's event was cancelled...)


-----------------------------------------

> 1/ I've had good feedback about the following potential student groups
> a. CPD for Primary & Secondary teachers
> b. CPD for Ad agencies wanting to turn digital
> c. Portfolio classes for younger adults
> d. Access courses for university/ college for younger adults

> Q: Which of the above do you think are relevant to your teaching?
> Q: Are there other groups I should look at?
> Q: Do you know of specific people/ organisations I should talk to who have access to any of these communities?
> Q: Do you have any ideas about where specifically I should advertise to reach appropriate student groups?

All groups seem relevant. Also add CPD for working software
developers, eg people in the user groups who want to learn new stuff.

For advertising, I suggest contacting local student societies directly
- primarily the computing societies but maybe also maths, engineering,
physics. These rate well for students who are keen to pick up skills
outside the standard curriculum, and communication inside the socs
tends to be more efficient than via the corresponding department...

> 3/ So far the classes I know folks are interested in teaching are broadly
> a. Web Skills inc  Django HTML, CSS & Javascript
> b. Drawing and animation
> c. Data Visualisation
>
> Q: Have I got this right?
> Q: Have there other things you'd like to teach? If so what would you like to teach?
> (NB i'd like to have around 10 folks involved in teaching so it would be good to have a few more folk on board)

See the two threads I set up

> 4/ I am working out a schedule that I think would be feasible so that we can make the classes a success
> My experience of this is that you need circa 3 months to organise a series of events, 2 months lead time to make contact with potential students/ organisations and 6 weeks advertising push through blogs emails and other media. This would mean a start date in teaching of around the 1st of June.
>
> Q: Does the end of May sound like a feasible date to start advertising the classes
> Q: Does June sound like a feasible date to start classes?
> Q: Will too many folks be on holiday - does this clash with other arrangements?
> Q: What alternative dates would you suggest?

Sounds very reasonable.

> 5/ There are some experienced teachers amongst you but others have indicated that they are interested in teaching but lack confidence in their teaching skills.
>
> Q: Would you be interested in holding classes in Teaching Skills?
> Q: would you be interested in learning teaching skills?

I think the answer should generally be yes to both for most people
here.

Also, it'd be great to get interested people along to some real
(technical) taster sessions, to see existing teachers at work, ie
rather than it being theoretical or abstract, they can see directly
how others approach and convey material. Then we can follow up with
refinements to technique.

For this to work, a few of us will need to organise 1-3 workshops
quite soon as examples (maybe as extended talks inside a user group
context?).

> 6/ A few of you suggested running Taster Sessions to get an indication of interest and competency levels.
> At the moment I am looking at making this possible for folks with special privileges within the system. Please note that these privileges will be for those folks i know are committed and have spoken to about this - but I am more than happy to hear from people who are interested in talking to me about this.
>
> Q: How many Tasters would you want to run to gauge interest in a course?
> Q: Should these be tied to the course you are planning on running? (i.e the same venue etc)
> Q: Should there be an upper limit on the number of folks attending?

Hard to answer. We should also expect to give tasters as part of the
advertising, eg to convince people that it's a good way to learn and
to get them to help spread the word. It also depends on the type or
planned length of a course. Clearly we shouldn't do too much for free
though!

One final point: I think there needs to be some discussion about
expectations and rewards. I'll kick this off in a day or two.

Paul