Archive for June, 2012

Things I Am Good at and Like to Do

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

I have been talking to people who have asked me questions like "what do you like to do in your job?" and "What kind of things are you good at?" It’s performance review time at Microsoft so this is a natural time for me to do some self-analysis as well. I tend to think better when writing things out so this document (or what ever you want to call it) was born out of my trying to think things out.

I should probably put it on my website or with my resume and maybe I’ll get to that. But I think I want to see what it looks like here and think about it before I do that.

 Public Speaking

Whether it is an Internet safety talk for small classes of first graders or a conference keynote for hundreds of university and high school educators my talks get great reviews. I’ve given career talks, Internet safety talks, and talks about new technology to students of all ages. I’ve given technical presentations at conferences such as SIGCSE and CSTA’s CS & IT Conference (I’m on the CS&IT program committee as well)  and many more.

Adapting the material and the presentation style to the audience is something I do very well. I am flexible about talk length, topics, presentation style and willing to take into account even last minute changes caused by unexpected circumstances.

Sharing my knowledge and experience through interesting and occasionally humorous presentations is a one of the great joys in my life.

Social Computing

From USENET news to email discussion groups to threaded discussion forums to Facebook, Twitter and blogging I have been involved in social computing for well over 25 years. I’ve built online communities, moderated forums of many types, consulted with company policy makers about Social Computing problems, opportunities and personnel issues. I have moderated online communities and dealt with issues personal, cultural (especially important in the multi-national/multi-cultural communities I have been involved with, political and technical.

My blog focused on computer science education averages over 10,000 unique visitors a month. My Twitter account has over 4,000 followers. I’m involved with LinkedIn, Google+ and of course Facebook.

I have a Klout rating of 60 and enough experience with analytics to know that’s a rough measure at best and not worth getting too excited about.

Teaching and Training

I have classroom experience with students from kindergarten to college and was a full-time teacher for nine years. My professional development sessions, from one hour workshops to multi-day in-depth training events are very popular with repeat invitations common.

I’ve created and presented custom training for student mentors, classroom teachers, and train the trainer events for education professionals of various backgrounds. Hands on labs for several groups of students on a technology new to them? No problem!

I leave my students with copies of the presentation materials as well as additional resources for their own continued development.

Curriculum and Resource Development

Starting from my years as a classroom teacher I have been working on curriculum development and resources for over 18 years. I developed computer curriculum for elementary, middle and high schools. I’ve written multiple textbooks that are still in use in schools all over the country. My popular set of project books for teaching programming with Visual Basic and C# have been updated with each new version of the software and are widely used.

I am a regular contributor to and recommender of resources in Microsoft’s Faculty Connection site.

At the higher education level I am a member of the ACM/IEEE CS 2013 committee which is developing curriculum recommendations for university undergraduate computer science departments.

I am on the industry advisory board for numerous career/technical high school programming and web development programs.