Minimalist Design for Informal Learning in Community Computing

We discuss the role and characteristics of informal learning in a community computing context. We argue that minimalist design can be adapted to the needs of community computing, and that its principles can be used to envision and develop community activities and technologies that promote active learning. We illustrate these ideas with several community computing projects that exemplify how to embed learning in meaningful activities, enable learners to make progress quickly, promote thinking and inference, evoke and leverage prior knowledge, and support error recognition and recovery. We conclude with a discussion of how minimalism might be used more broadly to guide the design of community computing systems and activities. Informal Learning in Community Computing Community computing refers to the use of networking, software, and activities to support community interactions. Classic examples include the Cleveland Free Net (facilitating dissemination of public health information; Beamish, 1995), and Montana’s Big Sky Telegraph (improving teachers’ access to library resources in rural Montana; Uncapher, 1999). Community computing is distinctive in that participants are neighbors in the traditional sense; they live in physical proximity and share physical, economic and social resources. In contrast to Internet communities, the information character of community computing is primarily local—description, news, and events pertaining to clubs and churches, public schools, municipal government, voluntary associations, retail businesses, regional economic development and social services. An important facet of community computing is learning. Learning may occur as an incidental outcome but is an inherent consequence of any creative human activity; people learn even when they “merely” pursue familiar interests and concerns in new ways. The Cleveland and Montana communities did not simply accomplish community goals more efficiently; they evolved a local Internet culture of new skills and practices. They learned how to use Internet technologies to accomplish new community functions. In Cleveland community health information dissemination evolved into community health discussions through which the hospital staff learned about the needs of their customers. In Montana, people accessed online libraries for existing information; the community created novel coding schemes to digitize Native American cultural artifacts, enabling cultural dissemination back into the libraries. Communities support technology learning in many ways, including just-intime training classes offered through adult learning centers, community colleges, and so on. In this paper we focus on informal learning (IL), working from McGiveney’s (1998) broad characterization: informal learning occurs outside of intentional learning environments such as classrooms; arises through people’s activities and interests; and even when provided in response to perceived needs is conveyed in a flexible and informal fashion. In the Cleveland and Montana examples, although there may have been an explicit effort to learn about community members’ needs on the one hand, and coding schemes, on the other, the shared learning was emergent and entirely situated in the ongoing activities and goals of the community. Community computing provides an especially rich—and challenging—context for analyzing and supporting informal learning processes (Figure 1). Community groups are often structured and managed in an ad hoc fashion. Goals and activities may vary dynamically as a function of membership, current leadership, and resources. Although this adds to the complexity of community group interaction, it also raises the opportunity for many different individuals to “step up” to the needs of their groups. Within these dynamic group structures, people enact multiple roles, relating to other members as parents, business colleagues, volunteers, and so on. Community members who bridge multiple groups have the potential for great impact on the community, in that they tend to be highly educated and more involved in civic concerns (Kavanaugh et al., 2003; Kavanaugh et al., 2005). Cross-group membership also has implications for informal learning, as people are able to see and act on the possibilities for cross-fertilization of ideas, methods, and resources (Putnam, 2000). Figure 1. Opportunities and challenges for learning in community computing The members of community groups vary tremendously in what they bring to shared efforts: in business settings, people collaborate because they have a “job” to do, but in the discretionary context of community efforts, motivation is often intrinsic but varies considerably across individuals. The diverse motivations interact with resource limitations such as time available, making it very difficult to develop and implement targeted learning opportunities. Also, because part of the shared capital in a community is a physical place, a variety of concrete experiential outcomes and rewards become more possible and common. Belonging to any community of practice implies a bond among members, but if we are managing the earth, this bond is inherently multifaceted and will lead to many levels and modes of interaction. The unpredictability and complexity—but also the richness of motivations, backgrounds, and roles—of community computing highlight a need for informal, contextualized learning processes that leverage community members' goals, skills, time, technology, and other resources if and when they are available. In the balance of this paper we argue that minimalist design provides a guiding framework for initiating and sustaining a broad-based learning culture that accommodates the just-in-time context of community computing. We first briefly review the principles of minimalism and suggest how they can be generalized to address community computing contexts. We illustrate our arguments by reflecting on several of our own community computing projects, concluding with ideas for future analysis and discussion. Emergent and dynamic group structures of varying size, function, and overlap