Service Learning in Information Technology Leadership: A Natural Connection

Peer Review, Fall 2006 by Hannon, Charles

Recent surveys document the growth of service learning on American campuses, whether through college-wide initiatives that encourage or require student involvement in community projects or through faculty-initiated, course-based academic structures.1 But there is little data on the number of academic majors that include service learning as a graduation requirement.2 The information technology leadership (ITL) major at Washington and Jefferson College (W&J), created in spring 2002, incorporates service learning in its required capstone course, ITL 400. Requiring service as part of our major enhances the benefits to the department and the community that usually accompany service courses.

Building Community Relationships through Information Technology

The service-learning foundation of ITL 400 creates continuity for the community organizations we work with and for the students in our program. The community organizations can think strategically about how to integrate the service of ITL students for both immediate and long-term projects, and our students can see themselves building upon the work of previous graduates of the program. For both groups, the horizon of the relationship between community and college becomes expansive, built upon shared goals and long-term commitments.

For the ITL department, these long-term relationships, and the variety of service projects they produce, help communicate to students, the community, and even our academic and administrative colleagues the liberal arts philosophy behind our program. When we created the ITL major, we sought to define the emerging field of information technology as a liberal arts discipline. Seeking to distinguish ourselves from traditional computer science programs, we emphasize the inherently interdisciplinary nature of information technologies. While we do require courses in programming and databases, we also require more interdisciplinary courses that draw upon traditional liberal arts disciplines such as psychology (in our humancomputer interaction course), history (in our IT and society course), and art (in several of our new media courses). Moreover, the three emphases available to our majors-information systems, data discovery, and new media technologies-naturally connect to the different divisions of the college and provide attractive courses for students in other departments who wish to minor or double-major in ITL. The project-based service-learning capstone helps us communicate the interdisciplinary nature of our program, and our contribution to fulfilling the liberal arts mission of our college, to multiple audiences.

ITL 400 students have worked with the Washington Community Arts and Cultural Center (Wash Arts) for each of the past three years. Wash Arts was established in 2001 to bring cultural programming and arts instruction to southwestern Pennsylvania children at low cost-free for children on free or reduced lunch programs. In the first year of our relationship with the center, one of our students facilitated the center's first offering of a digital music class. The class met once a week in W&J's technology center, and the student's duties included installing and maintaining the class's specialized software on the lab's computers; meeting with students before and after the class to provide tutorial assistance; and helping other students create CDs of electronic music they created in the class. In our second year working with Wash Arts, two ITL students taught Wash Arts' first class in digital art. Meeting at the arts center two nights per week, the students planned the entire curriculum for the course, and even brought department laptops and digital cameras to the class when necessary. Most recently, two ITL students made a twenty-minute documentary film about a neighborhood arts program run by Wash Arts, assuming all responsibility for filming, editing, and writing the narration for the film. These progressively more complex projects reflect the growing trust between the center and the college. Most importantly, they demonstrate the variety of skills-in oral and written communication and in project management as well as in information technologies-that we want to see in liberally educated ITL students.

Community-Based Projects

In many cases our service projects benefit from existing intersections between community organizations; sometimes we create new ones. For example, one student in the digital art class was also a member of an after-school Youth Engaged with Technology (YET) club at the local Washington High School. YET is funded through a five-year grant from the federal government's Children, Youth, and Families at Risk program. Students in this club learn a technology-rich curriculum and interact with the community through such activities as workshops for senior citizens and technology consultations. Students enrolled in ITL 400 have been working with the YET club for the past three years on increasingly complex projects.

In the first year, three ITL students attended the twice-weekly meetings and assisted in teaching the robotics, Web development, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) elements of the YET curriculum. For the GIS segment, they organized a treasure hunt in which YET students used global positioning systems to find a variety of items. In the second year, two other ITL students supplied similar instructional assistance during club meetings and arranged a visit to the Washington County, Pennsylvania, 911/Emergency Response office, where YET students learned about how the county was incorporating GIS technologies to improve emergency response. In the most recent year, ITL students provided instruction in LEGO robotics to YET club members interested in serving as robotics camp counselors over the subsequent summer.