Assistant Professor Rachel Magee has been named an American Library Association (ALA)-Google Ready to Code (RtC) Faculty Fellow. As an RtC Fellow, she will participate in Phase II of the Libraries Ready to Code project, which ALA and Google launched in January 2017 to help equip librarians with the right skills and tools to encourage kids to code.
Magee and her five RtC Fellow cohorts will collaborate to redesign one of their courses to integrate Ready to Code ideas. After piloting their new courses this fall, they will share their revised syllabi and course models with library and information science colleagues at other institutions.
"For the fellowship, I'll be working on redesigning the syllabus for Youth Services Community Engagement (LIS 490YSL) to include coding and computational thinking concepts. The new version of the course will be offered in Fall 2017 through the Leep online learning option for MS/LIS students. I look forward to working with the other fellows and attending the RtC Fellow workshop at ALA this summer," said Magee.
Magee is a youth advocate who teaches about and researches youth technology and information practices, informed by her background as a public librarian. Her research efforts include App Authors, a three-year project to develop curricula for app-building in school and public libraries. Magee holds a PhD in information studies from Drexel University, a master's degree in information resources and library science from the University of Arizona, and a BS in radio-television-film and a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin.