Bridging the Gap

School districts across the country are increasingly seeking out digital tools to support the work of educators, in the hopes of improving students' academic achievement. With the rapid emergence of this new market, many districts have been challenged by the task of identifying and procuring educational technology (ed-tech) products that match the needs of their educators and students.The NYC Department of Education's "Innovate NYC Schools" division, supported by a U.S. DOE Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, aims to address this problem, in part by promoting "user-centered design," an approach that puts the needs and preferences of products' intended users (in this case, teachers, students, and parents) front and center in the development and procurement of new technology.Bridging the Gap describes the design and implementation of three Innovate NYC Schools initiatives grounded in user-centered design theory:School Choice Design Challenge (SCDC),an effort to develop apps that would help students explore and narrow down their choices of high school.#SharkTankEDU events, during which ed-tech developers present a product to a panel of educators who provide feedback on the tool.Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenges (SCEC), a classroom-based, semester-long pilot of ed-tech tools intended to inform product development, as well as the ultimate procurement decisions of school staff.The report focuses on four phases of work involved in bringing ed-tech companies and the users of their products together: defining a problem; selecting users and ed-tech companies; implementing pilot-based initiatives; and evaluating products. It describes strategies used and challenges faced, and offers practical lessons gleaned from the experiences of the individuals who designed and participated in these efforts.

Better Together

Calls for a nationwide campaign to overcome civic apathy and outlines the framework for sustained, broad-based social change to restore America's civic virtue

Building virtual bridges: how rural micro-enterprises develop social capital in online and face-to-face settings

In rural UK, businesses are often isolated and have much to gain from healthy networks, yet studies show that many rural business owners fail to network effectively. Information communications technologies offer new ways to network that might benefit rural businesses by expanding their reach. This study looked at online and face-to-face networking behaviour among rural micro-enterprises in Scotland in relation to the development of bonding and bridging social capital. Given the challenges of remoteness faced by many rural businesses, online networking is particularly useful in developing bridging capital, but is an unsuitable context for building the trust needed to gain tangible benefits. The article therefore highlights the importance of face-to-face interactions in developing trust and bonding social capital. Rural business owners face distinctive challenges with respect to online communications, which are explored in this article

Worldwide Workshop on Youth Involvement as a Strategy for Social, Economic and Democratic Development

Summarizes January 2000 discussions on building capacity in the field of youth service. Explores connections with social capital, economic productivity, adolescent development, marginalized youth, civic engagement, and policy. Includes country summaries

Police Executive Research Forum: Freeing Local Police from Immigration Enforcement

Dealing with immigration issues is one of the most critical and frustrating challenges police and sheriffs' departments currently face. To solve this problem and take some pressure off their members, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) has conducted research and met with police leaders to frame immigration policy recommendations not only to guide local authorities, but to inform Congress and the Obama administration as well

Service-Learning Practice in Upper Division Geoscience Courses: Bridging Undergraduate Learning, Teaching, and Research

This article describes the use of service-learning practice in geoscience courses taught at the University of Connecticut. The stated objectives for instituting this practice are: to foster student interest in earth sciences through community service; to enhance university outreach through interactions with communities; to enhance students' learning ability by applying course knowledge to real-world problems; and to encourage the student-centered learning process and team-work as cooperative learning. Favorable responses from both students and local community leaders show that service-learning is an effective way to improve geological undergraduate learning. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals