University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
LIS 518A Community Informatics Fall 2012
Wednesdays 9-11:50 in the Henderson Room except Thurs Oct 4
Course documents and website https://courses.lis.illinois.edu/
Instruction team
Assistant Professor Kate Williams
LIS 344, katewill@illinois.edu
217 244 9128
Teaching Assistant: Navadeep Khanal, PhD candidate
khanal@illinois.edu
Office hours
Thursdays 10-12 and by appointment.
Course description
A survey of key concepts in an emerging field that studies how local, historical communities are
using information and communications technologies. Covers key principles for work in the nonprofit/public sector as people harness new technologies and media as individuals, students,
families, community organizations, and so on. Overarching ideas prepare both professionals and
researchers to understand and master this environment, whatever their technology background.
Especially useful for those interested in public or community libraries, youth services, social
work, education, and anyone interested in working with or studying underserved communities.
The required course for the community informatics specialization.
Course structure and assignments
1. SESSIONS:
a) Wednesdays 9-10:50, lecture and discussion. This goes until 11:50 on August 29,
September 5, December 12. Week of October 3, class meets on Thursday October 4 in
Illini Union 209.
b) Weekly 11-11:50 September 12-December 5 except Thanksgiving week, Digital Divide
Lecture Series with guest speakers. Twelve students are needed to do
INTRODUCTIONS. Those of you who are worried about speaking up in class, or
interested in making a connection to a professional (think jobseeking) can sign up for
this.
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c) Thursday, October 4 9-11:50, Meet with the LEEP section of LIS 518 in Illini Union 209.
You are also invited to class lunch that day at the Union Ballroom for $10 each. Lunch is
optional but encouraged.
2. LEADING DISCUSSION. Each student will lead discussion of a reading by identifying
three key passages and supplying three useful questions, all on one sheet of paper. With 27
readings and 20 students, those of you who are looking for a more structured way to
participate in class discussion can sign up more than once.
3. CYBERORGANIZING. The major project of the class this semester is to develop and launch
a localwiki for Champaign-Urbana. This is already in the beta stage at http://cuwiki.net. We
will plan this together starting week 1. Plan four hours a week for this and cyberorganizing.
Also see the assignment instructions.
4. CYBERNAVIGATING. Twice during the semester, each student will volunteer as a
CyberNavigator at either Urbana Free Library or Douglass Branch Library. Keep structured
field notes on each visit and append those to your final reflection paper. Plan four hours a
week for this and cyberorganizing. Also see the assignment instructions.
5. FINAL REFLECTION PAPER. This five page single spaced essay uses ideas from at least
three course readings (and anything else you choose) to reflect on and analyze your
experience in the field practicing cyberorganizing and cybernavigating. What did you teach?
What did you learn? What were the challenges? The breakthroughs? Make sure I can find
your answers to those four questions in your essay. Illustrations, for instance photos, are
encouraged, just don’t use them to cut corners on the five page length. Attach as two
appendices 1) your field notes from CyberNavigating and 2) a description of what you did
for cyberorganizing, including an explanation of how your team operated and any division of
labor.
6. All students are expected to be fully engaged, raising questions and contributing to
discussion to demonstrate understanding and contribute to the general progress of the class.
“Read with a pencil,” that is, mark passages of interest, take notes, make a list of key
concepts or questions or ideas, formulate questions to bring to class. For reading help, which
is something everyone in graduate school needs, make use of Paul Edwards, “How to Read a
Book,” in the course reading collection.
Texts
Kate Williams, Han Shenglong, Yan Hui, Abdul Alkalimat, editors. Community Informatics in
the US and China: Theory and Research. National Library of China Publishing House, 2012.
Available at cost ($20) from instructor; all but two chapters can be located in a book or journal.
Other readings will be available online.
Bring readings to class to refer to. Use the affordances of both paper and computer.
Grading
You will be graded on your active participation in class making use of the literature (this
includes presenting on articles and for some introducing a speaker; 20%), your cybernavigating
and cyberorganizing (60%), and your final reflection paper (20%).
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Schedule
August 29. Introductions/Why community informatics?
View: Michael Wesch, “Information R/evolution.” October 7, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM
Michael Wesch. "The machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)." March 8, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Playing For Change. "Stand By Me." November 6, 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM
Read: Anthony, Carolyn. “Building community: Bit by byte” pages 99-108 in eChicago 2009
(proceedings book), edited by Kate Williams. Available at http://echicago.illinois.edu
(click on events, find the 2009 proceedings).
September 5. What is community informatics
View: Philip Neustrom “Edit your city: Collaborative media in the 21st century” (video and
slides) presentation at eChicago 2012. Available at http://echicago.illinois.edu (click on
events, find 2012).
Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 8: Williams and Durrance.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 13: Chen.
September12. Community as history
Read: Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America,
and what we can do about it. New York: One World/Ballantine Books . Pages 3-46.
September 19. Community as network
Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 1: Wellman and Leighton.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 2. Lin.
September 26. Community in inforev 1: the Digital Divide
Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 19: Yu.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 14: Williams and Yan.
October 4. Community in inforev 2: Manuel Castells
Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 3: Castells/Dual City.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 4: Castells/Grassrooting.
October 10. Theories of community in the information society
Read: Himanen, P. (2001). Page 4-19 and 139-142. In The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the
Information Age. New York, NY: Random House.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 5: Lévy.
October 17. Virtuality: Local experiments
Read: Virnoche, M. E. (1998). The Seamless Web and Communications Equity: The Shaping
of a Community Network. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 23(2), 199-220.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 10: Alkalimat/Social Cyberpower
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Rheingold, H. (1993). Introduction, Chapter 1and 2. In Virtual community:
Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-Wesley.
October 24. Virtuality: Wide area experiments
Read; Lih, A. (2009). Chapters 5 and 6 of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion.
Ludlow, P., and Mark Wallace. (2007).Introduction, Chapter 1 and 18. In The Second
Life Herald: The virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
October 31. Public computing: The place
Read: Jack Qiu, Working Class Network Society, Chapter 2 Internet Cafés.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 11: Williams and Alkalimat/Census.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 18: Wang
November 7. Public computing: Teaching and doing
Read: Finn, P. J. (1999). Page 121-207. In Literacy with an attitude: Educating working-class
children in their own self-interest. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
CI in China and the US, Chapter 12: Williams/Informatics Moments.
November 14. Cyberpower: Making a difference
Read: Williams, K. & Alkalimat, A. Cyberpower. In Pattern Language for Communication
Revolution. Doug Schuler, editor. MIT Press.
http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/print-pattern.php?begin=25
Pitkin, B. (2006). Community Informatics for Community Development: the “Hope or
Hype” Issue Revisited. Pages 77-98 in Networked Neighborhoods, P Purcell, editor.
Springer London.
November 21. No class, Thanksgiving break week
November 28. Examining the Illinois model
Read: CI in China and the US, Chapter 9: Alkalimat and Williams/Social capital and
cyberpower.
Rogers, E. M., Collins-Jarvis, L., & Schmitz, J. (1994). The PEN project in Santa
Monica: Interactive communication, equality, and political action. Journal of the
American Society for Information Science, 45(6), 401-410.
Demember 5. Applying the model
Read: Vos, V.-J., & Ketelaar, E. (2007). Amsterdam’s Community Memories: Research into
how modern media can be applied to archive community memory. In L. Stillman & G.
Johnson (Eds.), Constructing and Sharing Memory: Community Informatics, Identity,
and Empowerment. Cambridge Scholars Press.
Lenstra, Noah. Reading TBD
December 12. What you learned and why it matters
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