Social discussion of CS in K-12

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

My Community Informatics Studio class this summer is officially scheduled Wednesdays 6-8:30pm from May 20 to August 5. The class is open to students from other disciplines and it would be great to be able to create multi-disciplinary teams to work on projects.The class will be offered as a hybrid and so online students, or on-campus students who might travel some weeks during the summer, can attend remotely as well as in room 242 of the Library and Information Science building each week. 

This summer's design case is to develop and deliver new models of contextualized digital literacy programming to empower citizens to affect social change. If you've been thinking about doing Fab Lab/maker type activities or incorporating code.orginto your library, school, or community center programming, here's a chance to come together as a community of practice to consider how to customize and add wrappers to these often technology-centric, overly generic curriculum and activities. Ideally, we'll have participants from multiple disciplines including library and information science, education, social work, human and community development, informatics, etc. join the class each week to better inform our work.

The engaged librarian is well situated to harness their social knowledge of community values and goals to assure such programming addresses local interest and issues through effective information seeking and knowledge creation.Education brings important perspectives on effective curriculum development and evaluation. Social work and human and community development assure programming leads towards broader human and community development objectives. Gender, women's, and African-American studies bring essential critical perspectives to programming. Together we work to assure we address local issues in ways that also advance community agency and self-efficacy while challenging exclusionary forces to encourage progress from passive use of technical artifacts to co-creation of innovations-in-use by community, in community, for community.

For more information, see:
wp.me/ph5nE-eu

Please feel encouraged to distribute widely! 

— Martin