information

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What is community informatics?

Community informatics has very definitions, such as that it

…brings together people concerned with electronically enabling local (and virtual) communities; and structuring collaborations between researchers, practitioners (including industry) and policy makers to support community ICT implementation and effective use.

Community Informatics Research Network

Definitions such as the one above appropriately name various constituencies, thus serving organizational needs. But for me they are oddly both too narrow, excluding legitimate elements and activities, and too broad, lacking a principled organization or rationale.

Inquiry cycle
Inquiry cycle

The Inquiry Cycle

I’d like to suggest an alternative, drawing from the experience of the Community informatics Initiative (CII) at the University of Illinois, as well as helpful discussion with CII staff and students. The organizational principle that I’d like to suggest is that community informatics is a form of disciplined inquiry, with central questions, methods of investigation, actions, collaborations, and theories. I’d like to present that here using the the Inquiry Cycle as a framework and CII activities as concrete examples.

The Inquiry Cycle (Bruce, 2009) characterizes inquiry as involving five major aspects: a guiding question (Ask), methods of investigation (Investigate), active participation (Create), collaboration and dialogue (DIscuss), and reflection (Reflect). These aspects don’t necessarily proceed in a prescribed order; inquiry may involve any of the aspects in varying degrees and orders. For example, Reflect is often the beginning point of inquiry, leading to the formulation of the Ask. The idea of cycle (or better, spiral) suggests that inquiry does not complete, but generates further inquiries.

Community Informatics as a Type of Inquiry

The definition below is rather lengthy. Think of the Ask as the core question that defines community inquiry. The other elements then elaborate on that, emphasizing the variety of approaches needed to address the core question.

Ask: How can we work with communities to learn about democratic participation in the digital age, and to promote engagement with information and communication technologies for both individual and community growth?

Investigate: CII investigates the ways that people in communities create and share knowledge, how social networks operate and evolve, how access to technologies is differentially distributed, especially along lines of race and class, and the development of policy regarding information and communication technologies. These communities may be large or small, geographically-based or online. The goal of these investigations is to learn more about the dynamics of communities, their capacities and challenges, and how they make use, or not, of various tools. Basic research such as this is necessary for informed and meaningful action with communities.

Create: CII builds tools, such as Prairienet, Community Inquiry Labs, geographic information systems, media archives, and computer technology centers. It works with organizations such as Books to Prisoners, S.O.A.R. [after-school program]@ B.T. Washington Elementary, Paseo Boricua, and others to expand opportunities for learning and to support social justice. Building as well as using tools in a critical manner not only addresses immediate needs; it’s a key aspect of learning about community informatics.

Discuss: CII provides forums for interaction and collaboration, such as the Journal of Community Informatics, CI Reflections blog, and the CI Research Series. A diversity of theories and methods are not only welcomed, but seen as necessary for understanding diverse and changing social and technological realities.

Reflect: CII helps make sense of experiences of communities as they use information and communication to address their needs. It also critically analyzes its own inquiries, its tools, and its modes of interaction and collaboration. These reflections help build stronger accounts of community informatics, including extensions of critical race theory, political economy, critical literacy, as well as the development of new frameworks, such as the theory of community inquiry, and generate new questions for further inquiry.

References

Bruce, Bertram C. (2009, April). “Building an airplane in the air”: The life of the inquiry group. In Joni Falk & Brian Drayton (eds.), Creating and sustaining online professional learning communities. New York: Teachers College Press. [ISBN: 0-807749-40-0]

Cross-posted on CI Reflections

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TakingITGlobal – Inspire. Inform. Involve.

tigI heard Michael Furdyk from TakingITGlobal.org give a very interesting talk with slide show on Thursday. TakingITGlobal – Inspire. Inform. Involve. “is an online community that connects youth to find inspiration, access information, get involved, and take action in their local and global communities.”

It offers many of the features found on other social networking sites, but with a focus on social good and attention to the special needs of schools and youth leaders for protected spaces and appropriate content. Youth can share media they have produced as well as discuss projects around the world. They can participate in fully online communities or build an online community to support their face-to-face interactions. TakingITGlobal now works with 235,701 individual members and 1008 schools in 261 countries.

You can see a short CBC documentary about Michael and co-founder, Jennifer Corriero, here:

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Hidden Her-story: The Top-Secret “Rosies” of World War II

leann_ericksonNorma Scagnoli referred me to a wonderful podcast by LeAnn Erickson, Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Erickson is an independent video/filmmaker, whose work has appeared on public television, in galleries, and has won national and international awards.

Entitled, Hidden Her-story: The Top-Secret “Rosies” of World War II, it was recorded in January at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Philadelphia. I expected to listen for a minute and then go on to more pressing things, but after listening a little I decided that those things weren’t so pressing after all. It’s a fascinating story for anyone who has an interest in history, computers, women, education, mathematics, warfare, politics, Philadelphia, science, workplace equity, morality, or life in general.

In 1942, only months after the United States entered World War II, a secret military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike recruiting “Rosie” to the factory, this search targeted female mathematicians who would become human “computers” for the U.S. Army. These women worked around-the-clock shifts creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied victory. “Rosie” made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was invented to aid ballistic calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers. “Top Secret ´Rosies’: The Female ‘Computers’ of WWII” is a documentary project currently in postproduction that will share this untold story of the women and technology that helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age.

Controls for the podcast appear beneath the description on the EDUCAUSE page.

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Today’s Front Pages: Newseum’s map of newspapers around the globe

The Newseum, at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, NW, Washington, DC has a great, online map linking to front pages of newspapers around the globe. If you place the cursor on a city, you can see the front page in miniature; click, and it pops up in full, with a link to the newspaper website. You can also view the newspapers in Gallery or List mode. Currently, more than 575 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum.

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JAAL Technology Department

During 1997-2002, I edited the Technology Department in the International Reading Association’s Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (JAAL). The columns were intended to promote dialogue about new communication and information technologies and to explore what these media mean for literacy and literacy educators. Each had several distinct sections, including an “email” message from me, an “issue of the month,” often written by a guest author, descriptions of selected websites, and a glossary. In addition to the print version, each column appeared in the Electronic Classroom section of Reading Online.

The columns have now been collected into a book, Literacy in the Information Age: Inquiries into Meaning Making with New Technologies (2003, Newark, DE: International Reading Association).