Viewpoint

Extract

How exactly does one interpret the term ‘User Education’ and how is it best done? These are questions which still puzzle me after two years of working at them.

Rigid interpretation of User Education as chalk and talk stand-up teaching (‘class contact’) can reduce it to apolitical hour counting activity, useful for promotion but guaranteed to get least response from students.

Whilst I think that teaching methods are all important in User Education I would argue that they must be appropriate to the activity and not imposed for the sake of form. You can’t, for example, write a series of Information Retrieval lectures into a course submission document and expect them to work because they have a degree of legitimacy. The activity may be best treated informally.