(this page ca. 1995)

Goals and Methods of Teaching

Education is something you do to yourself.

Students and their teachers are engaged in lifelong processes of learning, and the important issue for each person is how to maximize conscious control of the processes, how to learn to direct one's own education. Librarians have a unique vantage point on lifelong learning, since they are called upon daily to stretch what they know. We have in addition a central role in assisting others to find what they seek, and to manage what they find. A librarian has many opportunities to teach, in formal and informal settings, and can also contribute to organizing knowledge access for students who may never be seen face to face. New electronic tools accelerate the pace of change and enlarge the public, but do not fundamentally change the mandate and the challenge: to help people continue to educate themselves.

An extended example of a specific application (Biology 182) is available.

I summarize my own philosophy of education as a set of labels, aphorisms and diagrammatic characterizations, each of which expands into a longer narrative. Taken together they provide some definition for what I do and hope to do. The most appropriate medium for presentation is as hypertext, with the inherent possibility of branching to greater detail and then returning to a synoptic view.