Mutually Leveraging Information Technology Literacy and Community Networks

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This project will investigate informal technology education outcomes for people who engage in community network activities. It will develop and evaluate an infrastructure for highly interactive and collkaborative World-Wide Web projects, populated with community-built examples, and incorporating end-user authorizing tools and instructional materials designed to support informal, community-oriented community-oriented learning-by-doing of Web programming. It will document case studies of example application development utilizing this infrastructure, and an empirical evaluation of the technology literacy impacts that result from these application development activities; the empirical evaluation will also exmine career choice and employment outcomes, and collateral community impacts. It will produce a participatory design model for community groups (including an analysis of the boundary conditions for such an approach). It will investigate the hypothesis that the learning of information technology skills, and motivation for applying those skills, is increased and sustaied when people are emopowered to become producers rather than consumers of technology (i.e via end-user authorizing tools) and when they are provided with a meaningful contxt for learning and application that persists beyond and independently of the immediate learning context (i.e., the community). The potential impacts of this project are large. Thirteen community groups that vary according to age, gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity will be included in this study. The model that is developed will be disseminated to other communities.