International Journal of Computer-supported Collaborative Learning, 2007
Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based vol... more Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, and for primary group activities. During the past 12Â years, we have worked with community groups in Centre County, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery County, Virginia. We have built partnerships with these groups to better understand and address their learning challenges with respect to information technology. In this paper, we suggest that patterns, standard solution schemata for recurring problems (as used in architecture and software engineering, among other design domains), can be a paradigm for codifying and developing an understanding of learning in and by community organizations. Patterns are middle-level abstractions; they capture regularities of practices in ways that are potentially intelligible, verifiable, and perhaps useful to the practitioners themselves. We present two example patterns and discuss issues and directions for developing patterns as a theoretical foundation for community-based learning.
Information technology adoption and literacy are typically not first-order goals for community-ba... more Information technology adoption and literacy are typically not first-order goals for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, as well as primary group activities. However, volunteer organizations are often not able to make effective use of Internet-based technologies and content. They lack resources of all sorts (money, skills, telecommunications infrastructure) as well as organizational structures, protocols, and continuity to effectively cope with the rate of change in Internet technology. We describe a design pattern, a standard solution schema for a recurring problem, that proposes a self-sustained process in which volunteer organizations identify and analyze their technology needs, and then learn about information technology through active engagement in solving their own problems. The pattern, called Community-based Learning, is grounded in our fieldwork experience in several community computing projects. We discuss patterns and pattern frameworks as a research approach to community computing.
This paper develops research in the area of sustainable, long-term participatory design for commu... more This paper develops research in the area of sustainable, long-term participatory design for community groups. We adopt a perspective that emphasizes participatory design as a learning process and introduce hierarchical (cognitive apprenticeship) and lateral (collaboratively constructed Zones of Proximal Development) aspects of learning. We describe our experience of working with an environmental community group from the initiation of our involvement to the group adopting designer-like roles. The goal of our involvement was to induce a sustainable strategy of adopting, using, and maintaining information technology as an everyday organizational practice to reify the goals of community groups, even after we fade away from the process.
International Journal of Computer-supported Collaborative Learning, 2007
Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based vol... more Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, and for primary group activities. During the past 12Â years, we have worked with community groups in Centre County, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery County, Virginia. We have built partnerships with these groups to better understand and address their learning challenges with respect to information technology. In this paper, we suggest that patterns, standard solution schemata for recurring problems (as used in architecture and software engineering, among other design domains), can be a paradigm for codifying and developing an understanding of learning in and by community organizations. Patterns are middle-level abstractions; they capture regularities of practices in ways that are potentially intelligible, verifiable, and perhaps useful to the practitioners themselves. We present two example patterns and discuss issues and directions for developing patterns as a theoretical foundation for community-based learning.
Information technology adoption and literacy are typically not first-order goals for community-ba... more Information technology adoption and literacy are typically not first-order goals for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, as well as primary group activities. However, volunteer organizations are often not able to make effective use of Internet-based technologies and content. They lack resources of all sorts (money, skills, telecommunications infrastructure) as well as organizational structures, protocols, and continuity to effectively cope with the rate of change in Internet technology. We describe a design pattern, a standard solution schema for a recurring problem, that proposes a self-sustained process in which volunteer organizations identify and analyze their technology needs, and then learn about information technology through active engagement in solving their own problems. The pattern, called Community-based Learning, is grounded in our fieldwork experience in several community computing projects. We discuss patterns and pattern frameworks as a research approach to community computing.
This paper develops research in the area of sustainable, long-term participatory design for commu... more This paper develops research in the area of sustainable, long-term participatory design for community groups. We adopt a perspective that emphasizes participatory design as a learning process and introduce hierarchical (cognitive apprenticeship) and lateral (collaboratively constructed Zones of Proximal Development) aspects of learning. We describe our experience of working with an environmental community group from the initiation of our involvement to the group adopting designer-like roles. The goal of our involvement was to induce a sustainable strategy of adopting, using, and maintaining information technology as an everyday organizational practice to reify the goals of community groups, even after we fade away from the process.
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Papers by Umer Farooq