Rethinking University Education...

What would happen if the academics in the research-one class universities took a stroll through the neighborhoods that surrounded them? Would they be surprised by what they saw? Would they know anybody? Would their abstract concepts and theoretical models relate to or help the locals? Could they research with community members on real-life problems important to both of them? Would they even understand one another's language? Would they care about one another?

continue reading my introduction to community informatics

Community Informatics Projects is Jeff Ginger's PhD research and project collection website. Though it is not formally affiliated with the University much of the work here is connected to the Community Informatics Initiative, an effort dedicated to helping communities accomplish their goals through the development and use of information communication technologies.

This site serves several functions:

• Open access to all of Jeff's Community Informatics (CI) projects and scholarship
• Prototyping and hosting for various CI program and partner websites. if you'd like to make use of my webspace for free, with a few strings attached, see the website hosting section

Make sure to also check out the Community Informatics Club, a registered student organization that serves as a social and outreach extension to the regular CI curriculum.

About the Author

Vitae | Contact | Facebook

Jeff Ginger is a PhD student studying and library & information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His current studies revolve around social & community informatics, battling the digital divide (digital literacy), and human-computer interactions (HCI) and his dissertation will likely be some blend of the three.

Jeff also occasionally makes websites, pretends to be an artist, records fun noises, and likes to teach.

If you'd like to learn more about Jeff and his entourage of involvements and interests please check out his personal-professional website, JAG-wire.net.

• Concept Demos

• The Sao Tome Map Project
  Cutting-edge GIS support development tools and spatial data infrastructure design for the island nation of São Tomé.

  Prairienet Research
  An idea factory of sorts, this website hosts prototype projects for the design, implemention, and evaluation of programs and systems for a new revitalized Prairienet.

• Audio-Video Projects

• Rantoul: Storytelling in [Stop] Motion
  A digital literacy workshop run as an after-school and weekend program at the Rantoul Public Library. 5th graders learned to turn their stories into stop-motion videos! Use this as a guide to run your own program.

  Community Engagement, the mini documentary
  A high-energy documentary of student experiences in community engagement. Travel with Jeff as he visits Urbana IMC WRFU radio, Cunningham Children's Home, and Books2Prisoners.

• Recent Scholarship

• Enabling Spatial Data Infrastructure Development: Collaboration, Supportive Web Technologies and São Tomé (poster)
• Buzzwords in the Classroom: Making Sense of the Discourse About Web2.0 in Classroom 2.0 (paper)
• One Laptop per Child: Discourse in an Information Society Context (paper)
• Criminal [Digital] Literacy: A Response to Jonathan Rosa (paper)
• Exploring Methods in Community Informatics (poster)
• An Introduction to Community Informatics (presentation, going to redo this soon)