Pin the Tail

Hooray!
It’s timely, it’s pertinent, and I hope it blazes a trail to and from community to campus and beyond…here’s Pin-the-Tail’s very first Guest Blog Entry by blogger of Blogschmog, Kevin Makice:

Learning to serve, Serving to Learn
by Kevin Makice

I have been a computer user since the early 1980s and an Web surfer since the mid 1990s. Information and creativity were the initial draws, when I tried to keep up with other friends programming dungeon and alien games, or by connecting to USA Today sports services with a 2400 baud modem. Once the World Wide Web came into my life, however, the value of the Internet shifted to community. We can live in a better world because we have more ways to connect to each other.

During my stay at the Indiana University School of Informatics, where I am currently pursuing a Ph.D., I have come to a similar epiphany. I entered the program in 2004 with the mindset of taking course, completing assignments and getting a degree that would point me down a new, more lucrative career path. Along the way, I was exposed to critiques of education and different ways of conversing. In particular, I was inspired by a mini-conference sponsored by Community Outreach & Partnerships in Service-Learning (COPSL) that explained some of the ways that the campus and local communities could work together for mutual benefit.

Walking a Mile
Service-learning—and it’s companion community-based research—is based on the idea that coursework is relevant to real-world communities. Rather than assigning students hypothetical tasks in a laboratory environment, local organizations are incorporated into the curriculum to provide a grounded context for educational projects. In return, the community partners receive free labor and the outcomes of the student work.

In an ideal situation, the goals and needs of the classroom and the organization will be a perfect match. Ideal rarely happens, though. It is in the potential conflict and negotiation of objectives where much of the learning takes place. At a recent gathering at the IU Memorial Union run by the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SOTL), researchers shared some insights into building better partnerships. Their inquiry looked at the community side of the partnership to understand what kinds of benefits or hurdles organizations encounter when working with the University. Suggestions for improving partnerships centered around leveraging the University support structure, good communication, and appreciating the variation from partner to partner.

Designing Design Projects
My advisor, Eli Blevis, is the instructor of a core class for master’s students in the human-computer interaction program. The emphasis in this class is on thesis-quality design research that lasts the entire semester. To his credit, Eli is willing to make adjustments from year to year, iterating the format—at times, radically—to explore how to best serve the students and pedagogical goals. Two years ago, I was introduced to the wiki medium through this class and a formal structure of presenting work. The projects were independent efforts, and there were a lot of problems with the course.

After the COPSL conference that summer, I approached Eli about incorporating service-based learning into the syllabus. I was brought in to serve with another second-year master’s student as an associate instructor, and we rewrote the course. That iteration created six teams of 4-5 students working with community partners. Some problems from my class were corrected, but new ones surfaced. The current version of the class—students will be presenting final projects next week—increased the number of partners to ten and reduced the size of the groups to three students each. Thanks to some great feedback from students received last Tuesday, we will again revise the structure and content. Such is the nature of design, even for academic courses.

For the young designers, there are a few important advantages to working with community partners. First and foremost, the legwork of recruiting an organization or finding a user group is expedited. There is a built-in knowledge resource and usability group that comes with willing partnerships. Students also learn to balance the vital unencumbered vision of ideal designs with real-world limitations of money, time and expertise. This is a frustrating dynamic, and it doesn’t always get resolved smoothly. However, strategic design—the core competence of our Informatics program—is largely about structuring and communicating an effective explanation for why particular design choices are necessary. Without fail, the lessons learned in Eli’s class aren’t fully realized until the students enter their second year in the program and begin working on their own individual capstone projects.

The organizations are given a token number of service-learning hours, about ten per student. The intention of this time is not to leverage the technical expertise of the students to build web sites and upgrade computers. It is meant to be a form of ethnography where the students, by doing the work of the organization, can gain insight about how the place works and what problems are present. This isn’t something a community partner can communicate in an unbiased manner. People who work in glass houses may admire the view or fear stones, but they are rarely able to do both at the same time. Inserting fresh sets of eyes into the organization is an important part of the semester project. Unfortunately, we haven’t been successful in keeping the tasks beneficial to design.

Our community partners may have pre-existing expectations about what technology projects will deliver. Most will think “new web site” or “database” and have a difficult time moving away from that place. Our students are instructed to thoroughly understand the needs of the organization through primary and secondary research, leading to new insights and concepts that place technology in a beneficial position to address those needs. Strategic design plans are not implementations. They are grounded arguments for why the organization should follow a course of action that leads them to a better place in the world. We give them a poster, an annotated presentation and a literature review. Anything beyond that is a bonus. Some will be thrilled. Others will not. Such is the risk of entering a partnership.

Below is a copy of the presentation schedule for next week. The rooms are large enough to handle some guests, although campus parking is always a challenge. If all goes well, video of the presentations will show up on BloomingtTUBE, a soon-to-be-launched local version of YouTube. If you are an organization interested in need of some strategic design, it would be worthwhile for you to drop by and see the end result of these projects.

Of course, our hope is not for this to actually be the end of the projects. I am actively looking for other course instructors who might be interested in starting where our students leave off, attempting to implement some of these conceptual designs. One of the probable scenarios for next year is that these ten projects also become fodder for future HCI design teams. Everyone’s investment in this semester gains value if the presentation and CD or deliverables isn’t the end of the road.

TUESDAY, APRIL 24th - Library 033
4:00-4:30p CAPE
4:30-5:00p Monroe County Historical Society
5:00-5:30p Mathers Museum
5:30-6:00p Mathers Museum

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25th - Woodburn Hall 101
4:00-4:30p Buskirk-Chumley Theater
4:30-5:00p Humanetrix
5:00-5:30p CATS

THURSDAY, APRIL 26th - IU Library 033

4:00-4:30p Non-profit Alliance
4:30-5:00p BEAD
5:00-5:30p Sustainability City Initiative

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Tips, people, Service Learning, Town Gown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.