Demystifying Technology is our method for digital literacy education, a method that seeks to encourage movement from passive use to co-creation of innovations-in-use by community, in community, for community. It is being implemented both in digital literacy workshops and one-on-one technical support sessions with community members as part of various projects supported through the Center for Digital Inclusion, and also in professional education courses at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Guided by our Critical Interpretive Sociotechnical framework that seeks to foster knowledge power and challenge exclusionary forces, our participatory leadership process seeks to advance community agency and self-efficacy at each point of the information, knowledge, action, power cycle. The overall impact goal is to help citizens develop their capacity to play a leadership role bringing about their valued social changes.
Overall, our three foundations seek to not facilitate participants agency and self-efficacy to address local needs, but to do so in ways that also advance their knowledge power within community.
- Computational/design thinking & inquiry-based learning, particularly as implemented within community inquiry, are used to advance critical thinking and progressive education;
- The critical interpretive sociotechnical framework helps us to advance a critical perspective regarding the relationship between the social & the technical; and
- A revolution of values in technology education is essential in advancing a humanizing & people-centered approach grounded in popular education.
