In 2015, over two hundred million people, around the world, went online for the first time bringing the number of people worldwide using the Internet to 3.2 billion. Still, a majority of the world, about 4.2 billion, is offline. The barriers to going online and becoming digitally literate can be greater than just infrastructural obstacles, including psychosocial barriers related to incentives, affordability, and user capability. Our goal is to help the next 4 billion go online by designing an educational solution to equip people with digital literacy skills to improve their lives. We have employed a human-centered design methodology through community research, synthesis, ideation, and prototyping to build solutions first for northern and central India. The design may be re-contextualized in order to scale to new locations. This paper focuses on the research and synthesis phases of our design process during which we first define digital literacy relevant to the local context and then conducted fieldwork to collect stories, observations and quotes from numerous communities with varying levels of digital literacy. That feedback was translated into insights, themes, and frameworks that will later inform the design and development of an educational technology intervention.
-In 2015, over two hundred million people, around the world, went online for the first time bringing the number of people worldwide using the Internet to 3.2 billion. Still, a majority of the world, about 4.2 billion, is offline. The barriers to going online and becoming digitally literate can be greater than just infrastructural obstacles, including psychosocial barriers related to incentives, affordability, and user capability. Our goal is to help the next 4 billion go online by designing an educational solution to equip people with digital literacy skills to improve their lives. We have employed a human-centered design methodology through community research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and piloting to build solutions first for northern and central India. The design may be re-contextualized in order to scale to new locations. This paper focuses on the ideation and prototyping parts of the design phase and the initial pilots of the delivery phase, which are still in progress.
Each year the U.S. government invests more than $86 billion on IT products and services, yet the majority of these projects fail--they are delivered late, go over budget, are canceled, are outdated when finally delivered, or do not fit the user. Due to barriers in hiring and training, the government has tended to outsource IT talent at a premium price through contractors, but the results have not changed. The small amount of technology talent that exists in government tends to be senior, and there currently are very few, viable options for high-quality, junior and mid-level technologists to find a job in government and develop into senior roles. Agile Corps is a program designed to identify, recruit, train, and retain junior and mid-level technology talent in the government. This paper presents the design research and initial prototypes of the program and service called Agile Corps and introduces and prototypes the concept of public service-learning.
Service learning is an educational model that incorporates instruction, learning, service, and reflection. Many critics have highlighted weaknesses of service learning including its inability to address structural issues, build authentic relationships with communities, assess learning, and meet community goals. Expeditionary learning is a newer learning methodology that includes a focus on social justice, provides more time for building relationships and understanding community goals, and utilizes a portfolio-based assessment approach. Because Expeditionary Learning can address some of the weaknesses of service learning, we present Hybrid Expeditionary Service Learning--a new service-learning model that employs an expeditionary learning design and embeds both the classes and service of the service-learning program within learning expeditions. The paper highlights the rationale, benefits, and mechanics of how the expeditionary learning model reinforces service learning, and also how the service-learning model can reinforce expeditionary learning.
Started as a program in 2003 and then incorporated as a nonprofit in 2008, each year, LearnServe has taken students of diverse backgrounds from the Washington, DC area to experience a summer of international service-learning and social entrepreneurship. However, the students who travel abroad are not always prepared to go or able to successfully complete the post-trip activities. With experiences of extreme homesickness and severe culture shock, a lack of true social empowerment projects during the trip, and a lack of engagement in social entrepreneurship after the trip, the program directors realized there was a need to improve the LearnServe curriculum. The aim was to create an improved educational experience that prepares students to travel, engages them during the trip, and creates sharing and entrepreneurial opportunities afterwards. This paper presents the design research and prototyping work completed to redesign this service-learning program so that it meets its goals for success, more effectively preparing students to have a successful service-learning trip abroad and engaging social entrepreneurship work upon return.
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.
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This paper presents a dynamic learning framework (DLF) for engineering courses with rich mathematical and geometrical contents. The word “dynamic” implies that there are several moving components in the course contents and assessments. Moving contents are enabled by random-number generators to select text/paragraph from a database or chose a number between two ranges within engineering bounds. Dynamic contents are usually missing in traditional form of instructions such a fixed format book-type problem or static online material. The framework leverages on the computing resources from the recent advancement in touchpad computing devices (such as IPAD and Android based tablets) and web-based technologies (such as WebGL/SVG for virtual-reality and web-based graphics and PHP based server level programming language). All assessments are developed at four increasing levels of difficulty. The levels one through three are designed to assess the lower level learning skills as discussed in the “Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive skills” whereas level four contents are designed to test the higher level skills. The level-one assessments are designed to be easiest and include guiding materials and solved examples. To lessen the impact of disinterests caused by mathematical abstractions, the assessment and content presentations are strengthened by integrating the mathematical concepts with visual engineering materials from real-world and local important applications. All problems designed to assess the lower level skills are computerized and tested using the Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) algorithm which enabled the instructor to focus on the higher level skills and offer the course in partially flipped classroom setting.
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