Making Software as Community Inquiry: iLabs @ the University of Illinois
Anne Bishop (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science)
How do communities learn and work across institutional, disciplinary, cultural, socioeconomic, and other divides? How can information and communication technologies emerge as part of community life?
In this session, Professor Bishop introduced iLab software, a suite of freely available web applications (bulletin board, image gallery, document center for file management, web page generator, syllabus, catalog, etc.), that has been used to create hundreds of interactive web sites for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign courses, research projects, and public engagement initiatives.
iLab software is interactively developed by a collaborative based in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Participants in this international group include (to name just a few): an 8-year old girl in Champaign; a doctoral student in Finland; faculty members in Engineering, English, Library and Information Science, and other departments, both on campus and around the country; paid U of I student programmers; Latino youth in Chicago; a high school librarian; members of a blue ribbon environmental panel; and a local community action group devoted to Black women's health.
In this session, Professor Bishop discussed how the "design through use" process works, and what we're learning about how communities build software in the course of everyday life.
Presentation Summary
Professor Bishop began her presentation by discussing what iLabs is and how it is being developed. The iLabs software is a suite of web-based tools hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science that can be used freely for non-profit purposes by anyone in the world who has an Internet connection. This software provides space for web pages, file storage and distribution, classroom tools, bulletin boards, and other applications associated with course management systems (such as Illinois Compass) or commercial content management systems. The over 300 sites on iLabs are made and maintained by classes, schools, and community groups. These various users also drive the development. All development of this software is done by a collaboration of the user community and the development team at Illinois.
The most innovative aspect of the iLabs software is its development and use philosophy - a philosophy based on "community inquiry." According to Professor Bishop, community inquiry is based on the theories of the Pragmatist Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Pragmatists argued that democracy was not merely a political system relegated only to the operation of government, but a practice that should be intertwined with all other modes of social life. As reformer Jane Adams wrote, the goal was "...the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression." To create this democratic organism, social and educational endeavors needed to meaningfully incorporate all of the participants in all aspects of the project. The educational theorist John Dewey argued that "it is the democratic faith that [intelligence] is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute, and the value of each contribution can be assessed only as it entered into the final pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all." In basing the design and implementation of the software on these principles, Professor Bishop hopes that the very mundane practice of software development will lead to greater democracy and positive social change.
The design-through-use strategy of software development is putting this theory into practice. The software is being designed, according to Professor Bishop, to "respond to human needs by [using] the democratic process." She continues, "through creation of content, contributions to interactive elements, and incorporation into practice, users are not merely recipients of technology, but participate actively in its ongoing development." The resulting design will not only benefit the software and the participants, but it will aslo act as a model for, and even integrate into, the other work and activities that these community groups engage in.
The Paseo Boricua Community Library Project is an example of the way in which a community group engages the iLabs process through community inquiry and enhances both its own mission and that of iLabs. The Paseo Boricua is a Puerto Rican community center in Chicago. The Center wanted to use iLabs as a web page to communicate with its members and for outreach. Part of their desire with iLabs was also to catalogue their lending library. "Off-the-shelf" iLabs does not have the capability to serve as a catalogue database, so the project team at Paseo Boricua contacted the iLabs development team and they mutually designed a database for the service. This database is custom suited to the Paseo Library. However, since it is open source and a number of people not directly involved in the library developed it, it is available for anyone else to take and modify. The iLabs team also has the background to modify it for another group if necessary.
iLabs software is also being used actively in educational endeavors. On the U of I campus, iLabs is being used as a fundamental component in the Ethnography of the University Initiative. It is also being used in Graduate School of Library and Information Science courses such as LIS 491: Literacy in the Information Age. Educators at the K-12 level have also been using iLabs such as Bee Space. In all of these projects, iLabs is being used as both a means to transmit information to students, and as a way for students to engage in their own exploration of the course material and their own work and projects. Furthermore, these differ from other course management systems in that both the course material, and the student work, is often available to the public via the Internet.
To learn more about iLabs, Professor Bishop encourages people to get involved. Anybody can sign up for an iLabs site - the easiest and quickest way to get involved. For those who want to do more with the software, there are other opportunities, including the weekly meeting on Mondays, 12:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M. in LIS 52, 501 E. Daniel (1:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M. is open lab time).
About Anne Bishop
Ann Bishop is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School for Library and Information Science. Her research and teaching interests include information organization and access, scientific and technical communication, federal information policy, and community information systems.
Further Reading and Resources
See iLabs at: http://inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilabs (version 2) and http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ (version 3)
Background paper:
Bishop, A. P., Bruce, B. C., Lunsford, K. J., Jones, M. C., Nazarova, M., Linderman, D., Won, M., Heidorn, P. B., Ramprakash, R., & Brock, A. (2004-08-24). "Supporting community inquiry with digital resources." Journal of Digital Information, 5(3), Article No. 308.
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/Bishop/
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