Networked Information Systems as Generative Words: A new Freirean critical pedagogy textbook by Professor Martin Wolske

In 1997 I began teaching the Library and Information Sciences master's course "Introduction to Networked Information Systems". In 2000, as part of a participatory action research program agenda identified by grassroots community Partners in conversation with the University of Illinois' East St. Louis Action Research Project, the students in this course became my army addressing the digital divide through a service-learning component.

In 2008, Junghyun An shared her extended case study of the course as part of her doctoral dissertation, Service learning in postsecondary technology education: Educational promises and challenges in student values development. In it, she found the service-learning component of the course provided a valuable extension to the course itself. However, it only advanced critical student values development when students entered the course primed to advance their understanding of the deeper socio-cultural agendas related to the digital technologies and the Internet. To address this, over the last eight years the course has progressively been restructured to increasingly incorporate critical constructivist and culturally sustaining pedagogies.

In 2017 the service-learning component was removed to further advance a Freirean conscientization as a primer for progressive professional library and information science community actions centering people rather than things. This presentation will reflect back on this history of the course before introducing a new textbook, A Person-Centered Guide to Demystifying Technology  that brings together past research by integrating a critical pedagogy template in which the teacher-student uses "networked", "information", and "systems" as generative words, and uses digital storytelling and counter-storytelling as codifications and situation-problems. Through readings, recordings, small group discussions and professional journal reflections, and through hands-on activities with a Circuit Playground Express microcontroller and Raspberry Pi microcomputer, student-instructors work to identify and decode these situation-problems by working as innovators-in-use and sociotechnical meta-designers. It will conclude with the current and upcoming implementations of the textbook, and further research that is waiting in the wings.

The meeting is open to all. Meeting ID: 915 5474 8598. Password: IS400FALL

Questions? Contact Emily Knox