Community-based learning: A model for higher education and community partnerships

The effectiveness of community informatics as a vehicle for community development is considered through a critical review of CI literature. CI is presented as an academic construct that needs to reflect critically on its research and ICT practices. The goal to engage effectively within the social networks that comprise community ecologies requires the development and application of relevant, effective and appropriate practice and theory. Community learning theory is presented as providing an interesting route to understanding community development and a model of community learning partnerships between community and academe adopted in Brighton & Hove in the UK is discussed. We are surrounded by a pragmatic discourse that would have us adapt to the facts of reality. Dreams and utopia are called not only useless, but positively impeding. (Freire, 2002. p.7) Introduction Since its inception at the turn of the millennium community informatics (CI) has been imbued with a community development rationale (see e.g. Gurstein, 2000 and 2003a; and Pitkin, 2006). However, in practice, the impact of CI on community development is less than impressive. There have been many technological contributions at the micro level but there appears to be an increasing tendency to overstate the scope and nature of academic engagement in and with real life, geographically located communities. The technological artefacts and theoretical discussions emerging from much of CI discourse provide little convincing evidence of community involvement, preferring instead to focus on university based experiments or abstract technological projects remote from the challenges and realities of lived community. This is not to suggest that the work of all CI researchers/practitioners follow this trend. Far from it, one only need to look to the work that has been, and continues to be, done on Teeside, in Melbourne, Brisbane, Illinois or Milan to name but a few examples of good practice. However, much of what passes for CI appears not to be grounded in the rich, diverse and often socially contested spaces, social networks and processes that form community practice (Glen, 1993 and Butcher et al, 2007). CI is considered here as an academic construct that has some considerable way to go before it can claim to contribute to community development in any meaningful way or be viewed as an agent of meaningful and sustainable social change in a Network Society (Castells, 2000). With this in mind, a pertinent question for readers of this journal might be in what ways might community informatics contribute to the practices and policies of community 1 (T)he main purpose of community development is to enable people to work together in egalitarian and democratic ways to develop collective solutions to shared problems (Gilchrist and Rauf, 2006, p7)