Abstract
Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, and for primary group activities. During the past 12 years, we have worked with community groups in Centre County, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery County, Virginia. We have built partnerships with these groups to better understand and address their learning challenges with respect to information technology. In this paper, we suggest that patterns, standard solution schemata for recurring problems (as used in architecture and software engineering, among other design domains), can be a paradigm for codifying and developing an understanding of learning in and by community organizations. Patterns are middle-level abstractions; they capture regularities of practices in ways that are potentially intelligible, verifiable, and perhaps useful to the practitioners themselves. We present two example patterns and discuss issues and directions for developing patterns as a theoretical foundation for community-based learning.
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Acknowledgments
A predecessor of this paper, discussing only the informal developmental learning pattern, under the more general name “community-based learning,” appeared in the proceedings of the European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Carroll and Farooq, 2005). We are grateful to the US National Science Foundation (grant numbers 0106552, 0342547, 0353101, 0429274) for supporting this research. We thank our colleagues and collaborators Mary Beth Rosson, Cecelia Merkel, Lu Xiao, and Craig Ganoe for helping us refine our ideas on patterns for community learning. Our research would not have been possible without the wonderful support of the various community groups we worked with as part of the Civic Nexus project.
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Carroll, J.M., Farooq, U. (2009). Patterns as a Paradigm for Theory in Community-Based Learning. In: Carroll, J.M. (eds) Learning in Communities. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-332-3_15
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