Conclusion - Remediating the Community-University Partnership

The concept of remediation, as outlined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, offers a lens through which 21st-century partnerships might be analyzed and reinvented. Accordingly, this chapter argues that looking to the future, community-university partnerships will gain momentum as centralizing educational venues, while emerging technologies will offer mediated spaces where academic, professional, and nonprofit institutions merge to provide learning opportunities that engage both sides. This chapter situates the multiliteracy space—in this case the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity at Eastern Kentucky University—as a model for community-university partnerships that employ emerging technologies to develop communication skills.

Developing the Role of ‘Values’ Within Information and Communication Technology

This chapter investigates the Schools Intergenerational Nurturing and Learning (SIGNAL) project at Liverpool Hope University and its impact on communities of learning within some of the most deprived areas of the United Kingdom. Embracing the wide aims of Citizenship Education in England, SIGNAL encompasses intergenerational and partnership activities, volunteerism, values education, and entrepreneurial learning shaped to assist with the unique issues faced by diverse school communities. Central to the project is the engagement of service-learning (SL) focussed student teachers, and their use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Whereas the majority of research about SL investigates its value to participating students (Eyler & Giles, 1999, 2002), less documentation can be found demonstrating its value to recipients. This chapter will look at the reciprocal value of SL projects utilising ICT for school communities, drawing its research from past projects delivered across Liverpool since 1999 and celebrated at www.schoolsinteractive.co.uk.

The Tools at Hand

This chapter presents an anthropological case study of the response to rapidly changing technologies by members of a distributed network of 35 technology-based afterschool programs throughout California. University-Community Links (UC Links) is a collaborative effort among university campuses and local communities to develop a network, both physical and virtual, of afterschool program sites for underserved youth in California. While each UC Links program is a physical setting with its own set of learning activities developed in response to the cultural, linguistic, and educational concerns of the local community, the UC Links network as a whole serves as a larger virtual context for defining and pursuing shared goals and objectives and communicating information about effective uses of new digital technologies for afterschool learning. Using a cultural historical perspective, the authors approach UC Links as a sociotechnical activity system engaged in joint activity, and examine and assess its long-term adaptability and the differential capabilities of its local member sites to innovate in response to successive transformations of emerging technologies.

Incarcerated Students and the Unintended Consequences of a Technology-Driven Higher Education System

This case study outlines the partnership between the Minnesota Department of Corrections and St. Cloud State University. As higher education underwent significant changes in technology and distance education delivery during the 1990s, the print-based correspondence course was rapidly being converted to online delivery, leaving offender students without higher education access or options. The university-corrections partnership created an innovative and unique program through reverse-engineering online general education courses into print-based materials. The inability to use technology to provide cost effective education to many geographically dispersed students indicates that as a society, available technologies cannot yet be trusted to provide offender access to family, education and jobs while providing safety and security for citizens. What will make programs and partnerships like this successful in the future is the openness of corrections, education, and innovative technology partners to reexamine technology’s role and allow for changes in operational procedures that can satisfy the needs of all societal stakeholders.

Web-Based Information Science Education

Web-based Information Science Education (WISE) is a collaborative distance education model that increases the quality, access and diversity of online education opportunities. The WISE Consortium is a group of graduate Library and Information Science (LIS) programs founded on three pillars: quality, pedagogy, and collaborations (Montague & Pluzhenskaia, 2007). This chapter outlines the approach to achieving these three pillars and the assessment mechanisms used to measure the consortium’s success. Highlights include WISE Pedagogy, the administrative division of WISE dedicated to providing faculty development resources for online education, and WISE+, an initiative that supports partnerships enabling WISE schools and LIS associations to develop courses together suitable for graduate credit and continuing education. While the WISE consortium is specific to LIS education, the model could be applied more broadly to other disciplines.

Tightrope Walking

This chapter presents findings from an established service-learning module at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in a postgraduate IT degree programme. It describes the context at a local and national level for embedding service-learning within IT while likening it to the process of tightrope walking involving the complexity of balance and control in a sometimes uncertain terrain. The findings highlight both the challenges and successes of service-learning in IT following a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with community partners, the course director and the 2008-2009 student cohort. Service-learning provides a means of connecting students’ academic study with community and society with the explicit intention of promoting active and responsible citizenship (Bringle and Hatcher, 1996; Furco and Holland, 2004; Zlotkowski, 2007). Using service-learning in computing programmes is not new (Webster & Mirielli, 2007; Tan & Phillips, 2005; Scorce, 2010; Lawler et al., 2010); however, an analysis of this work taking the perspectives of multiple stakeholders and its contexts within Ireland are all original.

Integrated Product Teams at The University of Alabama in Huntsville

The capstone senior design class in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is taught as a distributed Integrated Product Team (IPT) experience. Engineering students are teamed with students of different disciplines within UAH and with students at universities in other states and Europe. Because of the distributed nature of these teams, the IPT students must use a variety of technologies to communicate. The authors of this chapter found that the students prefer familiar, informal, contemporary forms of communication, including Google Groups/Sites, Skype, instant messaging, e-mail, phone calls, and text messaging for team communication and project management, and reject more formalized forms of communication, even if advanced features are offered. Most importantly, the authors found that the effectiveness of all forms of technology based communication tools is greatly enhanced when the students have the opportunity to personally meet prior to the design semester.

Using the XO Laptop to Build a Digital Bridge Between Primary Schools and Universities

One-to-one computing has emerged as a controversial framework for integrating technology in education. The Cambridge Friends School XO laptop pilot program is a collaboration between the Digital Literacy Project (DigiLit), a non-profit and Harvard College student organization, and the Cambridge Friends School (CFS), an independent K-8 school. This chapter will examine both positive and negative features of the program, as well as a model for implementation of similar programs. DigiLit introduced low-cost XO laptops to two grade levels and designed laptop-based lesson plans. The author also investigated the XO’s effects on collaborative behavior, finding that laptops influenced mobility and sharing of information during group activities. As part of the pilot, students tested new software and completed a survey about the design of an open-source spreadsheet program. The partnership between DigiLit and CFS has provided a platform for researching child-computer interaction and for developing a laptop-based curriculum.

Using Digital Technology to Enhance a Century Old Partnership between University and Cooperative Education Employers

Cooperative Education (the systematic alternation of school and work) creates ongoing partnerships between institutions of higher education and their corporate partners. The beauty of co-op is that it allows feedback on student work performance while the student is enrolled in an academic program. The objective of this project was to use emerging digital technologies to capture partnership information and channel it back to faculty in charge of curriculum development for summative and formative purposes. The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) through the grant Developing a Corporate Feedback System for Use in Curricular Reform. The project resulted in a system that captures the level and uniformity of student work performance and reports the data both numerically and graphically both separately and in combination. Performance uniformity as a measure is important, as it illustrates how well all students in a group absorb the instruction.

Partners in Storytelling

In 2006, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) entered into a unique partnership with Retirement Living Television (RLTV). Initially driven by the practicalities of bringing a new broadcast network to air, the relationship came to influence the role of new media technology in teaching and learning on the UMBC campus. The Charlestown Project brought university students and senior citizens together to create short digital movies. The project also became a catalyst for creating human connections beyond the campus and across generations. Along the way, students formed new attitudes towards aging and community, and the campus attained an increased awareness of the power of digital storytelling.