Floating Eyeball

I’m a big fan of Boys & Girls Clubs. By and large these clubs foster emotionally supportive spaces where kids play, learn, form relationships with peers and adults, and engage in worthwhile or enriching activities. For most of these kids, this after school time is critical because their parents work. Staff members describe the kids [...]

Man under a tree, a photo by jschinker on Flickr. Spent some time scanning Flickr today for images with Creative Commons licensing that relate to our work. Some of these images possess visual elements that I like, in others the “content” is important. Do what you will with this image. It makes me thirsty.

In my last post I contrasted training (as technical proficiency) with education (as creative, critical thinking) in the context of a Krugman column which argued that middle class jobs are being hollowed out by technology progress which eliminates jobs that can be routinized, including legal and health analysis, which were thought to have required too [...]

At TASCHA, we talk a lot about computer skills training: how to operate a mouse, surf the Internet, save a document to enhance digital literacy among community members for the purpose of promoting social and economic development and inclusive communities. Because our work has focused on economically poor people (a contested term of course–feel free to [...]

March madness is here and I have hoops on the brain. (Please excuse the gratuitous Husky hype: Cold Blooded.) Basketball is an incredible game. While it can be played alone, it is much better as a team. The social play is special. Boys & Girls Clubs have figured this out. Basketball and social play prominently [...]

TASCHA researchers Maria Garrido and Beth Patin are in Chile conducting crisis informatics research. Essentially they want to understand the role that community technology centers and libraries played in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake/Tsunami. I haven’t been to the field with Maria in a while, but one of her great strengths as a researcher [...]

Social scientists often avoid epistemology. Armed (consciously or not) with a lifetime of accumulated assumptions, they often skip primary questions of what and how we can we know. It’s bizarre to me that people who call themselves scientists avoid these questions so easily. Your assumptions of objectivity will not stand, man. The emperor wears no [...]

It’s funny how a giant research project that lasted longer than one year and produced huge amounts of data and hundreds of pages of write up is boiled down consumed: reading, scanning, glancing, judging the cover, etc. Or ignored. In an age when people’s attention is drawn in so many directions, the ability of researchers [...]

Karen Saville (fellow HCDE PhD student) and I are doing a class project for User Centered Design. We want to understand the ways that UW student makers (particularly engineers and designers) use social media and information resources when they are in the field. We are looking for people who would be willing to talk with [...]

Maybe the speed of the blogosphere makes people tell stories with underdeveloped angles. Or maybe, the “underdeveloped angle” provides a glimpse into the assumptions (correct or incorrect) that structure our thinking. It’s not misdirection, it’s revelatory. An example is this Atlantic piece, which asks “Why Isn’t the Internet Helping the Unemployed?” The premise is that [...]