PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 21, No. 6, Sept. 20, 2001

Interview by Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
(217) 244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

Photo by Bill Wiegand Job: Peter Kimble has been a high school teacher and a sound technician for several 1970s rock bands. For the past five years, he has been a computer-assisted instruction specialist at UI.

Job: Peter Kimble has been a high school teacher and a sound technician for several 1970s rock bands. For the past five years, he has been a computer-assisted instruction specialist, helping hundreds of UI faculty and staff members and alumni master various software programs. Kimble holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and in the teaching of computer science, respectively, from the UI. His leisure interests include travel and reading science fiction and mysteries.

Tell me about your job responsibilities.
Well, the primary task is teaching workshops, mostly to faculty and staff [members], public school teachers and others, in using technology to improve whatever they’re doing in their job. Everything else that I do pretty much flows from there, which includes doing all the scheduling, deciding on adding new topics or discarding old ones. What I’ve been teaching are the image and presentation, classroom-related packages.

How do you decide what software to introduce?
A combination of just general undertones of conversations among various technology people on campus, things I see in the trade press, interest, cost.

How many different programs are you learning in a typical month or year?
In my case, it’s not really that bad – probably eight or nine different software titles at various levels. For example, with Photoshop, I teach three different workshops: beginning, intermediate and one that concentrates specifically on Web-related things. I’ve been dealing with computers and software for more than 25 years, so once you’re at a certain level of comfort it’s not that difficult to pick up basically what it’s going to do. There’s nothing like knowing that you’re going to be teaching a new workshop in six weeks to motivate you to really learn the new version of that software.

How many classes do you teach every year?
It’s probably 90 to 100 workshops per year.

You were a teacher at University High before you started here? What were you teaching?
I started there in 1974 and was there until 1996, for several years just as a part-time graduate assistant. This was back in the very early days of the PLATO system – long before the Mac, long before the PC. Eventually it evolved into computer technology, computer programming-type classes. I was doing some programming on the side back when I was a graduate student, and it eventually grew into my own software company.

Do you still have your own company?
I have been phasing that out. Essentially, it was a company that designed custom software for a computer company called Wang, which has kind of suffered in recent years. They used to make dedicated word processing equipment. I ended up having three or four other organizations along with that client, but now most of them have moved off in other directions.

How does teaching high-schoolers differ from teaching adults?
The one thing that I really miss about Uni High is the kids. It was just a whole ’nother level of energy. What I really like about the teaching that I’m doing now is that the people who are taking these courses are really interested in what’s going on. It’s the people that make this fun to do.

When were you a roadie for rock bands?
We’re looking at the early ’70s, so it wasn’t semi trucks full of equipment like they have at the Assembly Hall now. It wasn’t nearly as sophisticated. We could get all our stuff in one truck. We’d find some guys and offer to let them in free to the concert if they’d help us set it all up. We’d always have lots of help setting it up but never any help tearing it down.
We would essentially set up the sound system and then be sitting back there during the concert mixing the sound: a little more guitar, a little less drum, whatever it might need.
I spent about a year and a half traveling around with different groups, probably the best known of which was our six-week stint with the Grateful Dead. It was great. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. So I’m sitting there and I’d think, Y’know, I think Jerry’s [Garcia] guitar needs to be a little louder, and so I’d do it! That was fun, but it got a little tiring being on the road all the time.

What other groups did you work for?
Some of the other groups included the revised Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steppenwolf, Lee Michaels; we did a couple of things with the Carpenters, Black Sabbath, Procol Harum, Jethro Tull. They were all at the time relatively well known.

– Interview by Sharita Forrest