University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Graduate School ...

August 21, 2015

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Graduate School of Library and Information Science LIS 518A Community Informatics Fall 2015

Meets Thursdays 9-12 in the Henderson Room, LIS 131

Course includes Info City Lectures on Thursdays at 11, Marta Terry Thursday Oct 15 4-6, and Alison Macrina Friday Nov 20 9-12

Course documents and online discussion provided via listserv lis518fall2015@lists.illinois.edu

Instructor

Associate Professor Kate Williams LIS 344, 217 244 9128, katewill@illinois.edu Office hours Thursdays 1:30-3:30 or by appointment

Also to know: Community Informatics Research Lab doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra, nlenstra2@illinois.edu

Course description

A survey of key concepts in an emerging field that studies how local, historical communities are using information and communications technologies. Covers key principles for work in the nonprofit/public sector as people harness new technologies and media as individuals, students, families, community organizations, and so on. Overarching ideas prepare both professionals and researchers to understand and master this environment, whatever their technology background. Especially useful for those interested in public or community libraries, youth services, social work, education, and anyone interested in working with or studying underserved communities. The required course for the 9-credit community informatics certificate.

Course structure and assignments

The course combines seminar, lecture and field work. The weekly two hour seminar calls for active participation by students, bringing questions, experience, and perspective on the readings. The lecture is an opportunity to hear from the actual players to what extent and how key community institutions and sectors are integrating new technologies into their life, work, and culture. The field work puts students on the front line, learning to teach and support people in their everyday lives with 1) an online information source of, by and for the local community, 2) one-on-one tech help and 3) a community-based research suvey that listens to and helps people and local institutions.

1. LEADING SEVERAL DISCUSSIONS AND LEARNING ACTIVELY ALL SEMESTER. Each student will lead discussion of several readings by supplying for each reading an outline, a drawing/diagram/chart/table relevant to or from the reading, and two discussion questions, all on one side of one page.

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In addition to leading the discussion ~4 times, students are expected to be engaged in the discussion every week, learning and contributing to the general progress of the seminar. "Read with a pencil," that is, mark passages of interest, take notes, make a list of key concepts or questions or ideas, formulate questions to bring to class. For reading help, which is something everyone in graduate school needs, make use of Paul Edwards, "How to Read a Book," which will be in the course reading collection.

2. CONNECTING WITH A GUEST. Each student will introduce the speakers for one of the Info City Lectures or for the Library Freedom Workshop. (Or you may be called on to help with Marta Terry's visit). Get the speaker's email from the instructor and contact them for a short bio. Put that in your own words and shorten if needed, practice reading it. (Yes, bring your text!)

These next three are field assignments and will take 4 hours a week until Thanksgiving break:

3. CYBERORGANIZING aka LOCALWIKI. A major project of the class this semester is to contribute to an existing localwiki for Champaign-Urbana: . We will plan this together starting week 2. Keep a list of what you do for this and append that list to your final paper.

4. CYBERNAVIGATING aka TECH SUPPORT. Each student will volunteer as a Cybernavigator at a local institution. (Students will be matched with institutions in class.) Keep structured field notes on each visit and append those to your final paper.

5. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH. In partnership with one of our field sites, we are helping carry out a technology use survey among local seniors.

This is due Saturday, December 5:

6. REFLECTING aka FINAL PAPER. Your 2500 word final paper will use as many ideas from the course reading as possible (and any other sources you like) to reflect on and analyze your experiences in the field, seminar and lectures. Include for instance what you taught, what you learned, the challenges, the epiphanies. Include a photo or other graphic that illustrates your experience. Attach as two appendices 1) a list of what you did with the localwiki and 2) your field notes from tech support. Due December 8.

Texts

The course reading collection is all pdf files or online. Bring readings to class to refer to. Asterisks indicate readings from the CI Research Lab's recent literature review, which collected empirical work in community informatics; these readings are generally intended to be orthogonal to the topic of the week.

Grading

You will be graded on your consistent, active participation in class (1/3), your consistent and productive time in the field (1/3), and your final reflection paper (1/3).

Schedule

Note: The Info City Lectures are part of this syllabus. A schedule will be available at .

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August 27. Context. Cybernavigating

View: Michael Wesch, "Information R/evolution." October 7, 2007. Michael Wesch. "The machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)." March 8, 2007. Playing For Change. "Stand By Me." November 6, 2008. Cgpgrey. "Humans Need Not Apply." August 13, 2014.

Read: Damian Duffy, John Jennings, Kate Williams. Cybernavigator Stories [comic book]. Website at ; same content as pdf in the course reading collection Kate Williams, "Informatics Moments," Library Quarterly, Volume 82 Number 1, January 2012. Pages 47-73.

Bring: What video, movie, song, or other cultural artifact would you add to this collection to describe more completely this current moment?

September 3. Cyberorganizing

View: Philip Neustrom "Edit your city: Collaborative media in the 21st century" (video and slides) presentation at eChicago 2012. (click on events, find 2012). Marina Kukso. "Latest from Localwiki" video of October 10, 2013 Digital Divide Lecture. .

Check out: and . Read: Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world's

greatest encyclopedia. Hyperion, 2009. Chapter 5. Lunenfeld, Peter. The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. MIT Press, 2011. Excerpt. CI in China and the US, Chapter 10: Alkalimat. Social Cyberpower. Shachaf, Pnina. (2010). Social reference: A unifying theory. Library & Information Science Research, 32(1), 66-76. *Postill, John. "Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks." New Media & Society 10.3 (2008): 413-431. *Rangaswamy, Nimmi, and Sumitra Nair. "The mobile phone store ecology in a Mumbai slum community: hybrid networks for enterprise." Information technologies & international development 6.3 (2010): 51-65. Due September 3: IRB certificate sent to instructor by email. Do the researcher training ("Core Basic Training") on your own by logging in, reading, and answering questions. Then send your certificate (proof you completed) as a pdf.

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September 10. What is community informatics?

Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 8: Williams and Durrance, Community Informatics. Carolyn Anthony, Building Community Bit by Byte. eChicago 2009 [proceedings], Kate Williams, editor. pages 99-107. CI in China and the US, Chapter 13: Chen. Informatics of Happiness. Rogers, E. M., Collins-Jarvis, L., & Schmitz, J. (1994). The PEN project in Santa Monica: Interactive communication, equality, and political action. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(6), 401-410. *Kuriyan, Renee, Isha Ray, and Kentaro Toyama. "Information and communication technologies for development: The bottom of the pyramid model in practice." The Information Society 24.2 (2008): 93-104.

September 17. Community as history

Read: Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. New York: One World/Ballantine Books . Pages 3-46. Aiko Takazawa and Kate Williams, "Communities in Disasters: Helpless or Helping?" Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, Volume 10 Numbers 3-4, 2011. Pages 429-440. CI in China and the US, Chapter 9: Alkalimat and Williams. Social capital and cyberpower. Vos, V.-J., & Ketelaar, E. (2007). Amsterdam's Community Memories: Research into how modern media can be applied to archive community memory. In L. Stillman & G. Johnson (Eds.), Constructing and Sharing Memory: Community Informatics, Identity, and Empowerment. Cambridge Scholars Press. *Castro, Luis A., and Victor M. Gonz?lez. "Hometown websites: continuous maintenance of cross-border connections." Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies. ACM, 2009.

View: Debra Lissak, former Executive Director of the Urbana Free Library. Mary Ellen Farrell, Board Chair of the Urbana Free Library. "Policy: The Public Library" video of Digital Divide Lecture for October 8, 2009.

September 24. Community as network

Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 1: Wellman and Leighton. Networks, Neighborhoods and Communities. CI in China and the US, Chapter 2. Lin. A Network Theory of Social Capital. Yan Hui , Zhou Wenjie , Han Shenglong . Social Capital, Digital Inequality, and a "Glocal" Community Informatics Project in Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, Gansu Province. Library Trends 62(1), pp. 234-260. *McCarthy, John, and Luigina Ciolfi. "Place as dialogue: Understanding and supporting the museum experience." International Journal of Heritage Studies 14.3 (2008): 247-267.

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October 1. Special population: Older adults

Read: Sayago, Sergio, and Josep Blat. "Telling the story of older people e-mailing: An ethnographical study." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 68.1 (2010): 105-120.

Visit: The pictures here go with the article above; scroll down to the bottom of the page:

Read: Zeisel, William. "Designs for Change: Libraries and Productive Aging. Report on the National Library Leaders Forum (Washington, DC, September 26-27, 2005)." Institute of Museum and Library Services (2006). Read pp. 1-17; skim the rest, but read closely all sidebars p. 17/18/21/23/27/28/30/32 "Old Age" Wikipedia. *North, Sue, Ilana Snyder, and Scott Bulfin. "Digital tastes: social class and young people's technology use." Information, Communication & Society 11.7 (2008): 895-911.

View: Susan Fiske & Mike North. "Common stereotypes of people over 50." Over 50 and Out of Work. Give this video your full attention!

Explore:"Senior Corps" Corporation for National & Community Service. "National Institute of Senior Centers." National Council on Aging.

October 8. Community in inforev 1: The digital divide

Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 19: Yu. The Divided Views of the Information and Digital Divides. Kate Williams, "Rethinking Digital Divide Research: Datasets and Theoretical Frameworks," pages 109-127 in Main Fronts of Information Science and Information Management: Forum on Information Science and Information Management, Peking University (: , in English and Chinese), Chen Jianlong, Shen Jing, Zhou Qingshan, and Chen Wenguang, editors, Peking University Press, 2011. *Odendaal, Nancy. "The spaces between: ICT and marginalization in the South African city." Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies. ACM, 2011.

View: Michael Dilley, Fire Chief, Urbana Fire Rescue Services. Video of October 10, 2012 Digital Divide Lecture. .

Explore: Find what Pew Internet and American Life Project has to say about the digital divide.

October 15. No class, Special event at 4 pm

Thursday, October 15 at 4 pm: MillerCom lecture at Spurlock Museum, given by the George C. Miller Visiting Professor Marta Terry Gonz?lez. Dr. Terry is Director

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Emerita of the Jos? Mart? National Library, Havana. For more, see

October 22. Community in inforev 2: Manuel Castells

Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 3: Castells. Dual City. CI in China and the US, Chapter 4: Castells. Grassrooting. *Uotinen, Johanna. "Involvement in (the information) society-the Joensuu Community Resource Centre Netcaf?." New Media & Society 5.3 (2003): 335-356.

View: Greg Bruner, Illini Football Video Coordinator, U of I Intercollegiate Athletics. Overcoming digital divides in a college football team, Digital Divide Lecture Series, October 21, 2010.

October 29. Other key theories of the information society

Read: Himanen, P. (2001). Page 4-19 and 139-142. In The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York, NY: Random House. CI in China and the US, Chapter 5: L?vy. Collective Intelligence. *Best, Michael L., Bence Kollanyi, and Sunil Garg. "Sharing in public: working with others in Ghanaian cybercaf?s." Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. ACM, 2012.

View: Project Gutenberg. Panel 3 of "Fifty Years of Public Computing at Illinois." Luis Von Ahn, Massive-scale online collaboration. April 2011.

Explore: Internet Public Library and the earlier Librarian's Index to the Internet (LII),particularly their histories but also poke around the site a little,

November 5. Virtuality: Early experiments

Read: Virnoche, M. E. (1998). The Seamless Web and Communications Equity: The Shaping of a Community Network. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 23(2), 199-220. Rheingold, H. (1993). Introduction, Chapter 1 and 2. In Virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-Wesley. Ludlow, P., and Mark Wallace. (2007). Introduction, Chapter 1 and 18. In The Second Life Herald: The virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. *Gonzalez, "Boulder Community Networking: An Overview Focusing on Publishing" Ties that Bind: 1995.

November 12. Public computing: The place, people, tools

Read: Jack Linchuan Qiu . Cybercaf?s in China: Community Access beyond Gaming and Tight Government Control. Library Trends 62(1), pp. 121-139.

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CI in China and the US, Chapter 11: Williams and Alkalimat. Census.

Roy, Loriene; Bolfing, Trina; and Brzozowski, Bonnie. "Computer Classes for Job Seekers: LIS Students Team with Public Librarians to Extend Public Services." Public Library Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2010): 193?209.

*Julien, Heidi, and Cameron Hoffman. "Information Literacy Training in Canada's Public Libraries." The Library Quarterly 78.1 (2008).

Explore: The Great Good Place author Ray Oldenburg's site, starting with:

November 19. Public computing: Lessons about literacy

Read: Finn, P. J. (1999). Page 121-207. In Literacy with an attitude: Educating working-class children in their own self-interest. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

And:

*Clark, Lynn Schofield. "Challenges of social good in the world of Grand Theft Auto and Barbie: A case study of a community computer center for youth." New Media & Society 5.1 (2003): 95-116.

This is the last week you are in the field, you should be easing back, so that you can shift to writing it up and so you have time for this Friday morning event:

Friday, November 20 is a special event, 9-12 in LIS 131, Library Freedom Workshop (freedom from surveillance) led by librarian Alison Macrina. Reschedule your other obligations and if possible bring a laptop.

November 26: No class, Thanksgiving

December 3: Cyberpower: Making a difference

Read: Williams, K. & Alkalimat, A. Cyberpower. In Pattern Language for Communication Revolution. Doug Schuler, editor. MIT Press.

Pitkin, B. (2006). Community Informatics for Community Development: the "Hope or Hype" Issue Revisited. Pages 77-98 in Networked Neighborhoods, P Purcell, editor. Springer London.

Wei Zhipeng , Jiang Guodong , Niu Tuowen , Tim Zou , Elaine Dong . A Tale of Two Counties: How Two School Libraries in Rural Western China Serve Local Needs. Library Trends 62(1), pp. 205-233.

*Budka, Philipp, Brandi Bell, and Adam Fiser. "MyKnet. org: How Northern Ontario's First Nation Communities Made Themselves At Home On The World Wide Web." The Journal of Community Informatics 5.2 (2009).

Bring: Your final reflection paper to share highlights, because it's due in two days and you should already have a draft completed.

Due Saturday, December 5: Final reflection paper with attachments, all in one pdf emailed to instructor.

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