Social discussion of CS in K-12

["Wolske, Martin B" <mwolske AT illinois.edu>]

I was able to touch base with a few of you last night about the recent decision to teach the Community Informatics Studio course this summer. Last week I had a meeting with Bruce Litchfield, professor in the College of Engineering and a service-learning instructor,
 Will Patterson who is now director of innovation in Engineering, and Angela Slates, a student in my first CI Studio class while she was in the College of Education and now an incoming student at GSLIS. Angela's project in the studio had been to use participatory,
 evidence-based design strategies to redesign a public computing center in East St. Louis. She recommended to Bruce and Will that the studio would be a good forum for bringing in community input at the ground floor for a new community innovation space that
 is being setup within Grainger library.

We've formally added the Community Informatics Studio, LIS490STG (graduate) and LIS490STU (upper level undergraduate), to the summer II schedule. It will meet Tuesday and Thursday 1-5 in room 341 starting June 17 and continuing through August 5, with final presentations either August 8 or 9. The syllabus is now online at: http://courseweb.lis.illinois.edu/~mwolske/lis490st/summer14/syllabusSummer14-LIS490ST.pdf

Early next week we'll have a more complete description of the project at Grainger. At that time I'll send out a formal announcement and recruitment email. In the meantime, students are welcome to register for the course, distribute the link to the syllabus, and talk up the class to other GSLIS students and also to those outside of GSLIS who might be interested in the project.

If you have any students who you think might be a good fit to collaborate on the project this summer, please pass this information along to them. If you know of any community members that would like to join the class as a community credit student, please pass this information along to them. Please encourage folks to contact me if they have any questions about the class or the project.  It would be fantastic to have broad representation from a number of domains-of-expertise, both formal academic and applied community, participating in the class.

-- Martin