Community Informatics Seed Grant Will Help Incorporate Social Media into Spanish Community Service Learning



by Ann Abbott
image from www.podcastingnews.com

I'm very happy that I received a seed grant from the Community Informatics Initiative (CII) at the University of Illinois!

CII's most recent newsletter lists all the grant winners and their projects. The newsletter also includes items of interest to those of us doing Spanish community service learning:
  • The "Community as Intellectual Space" conference in Chicago's Paseo Boricua,
  • The third annual eChicago symposium, entitled "Cybernavigating our Cultures," and
  • The project on Participatory GIS for Empowering Low-Resource Communities
The funding will release me from teaching one course in the upcoming year (2009-10) in order to focus my efforts on finding external funding sources and tweaking my proposal to incorporate social media into Spanish community service learning. Of course, I'll be blogging about my ideas and progress with the grant-writing process.

In addition to the funding and time off from teaching, I am most excited about learning from the truly excellent people and projects within the CII and the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences. The are a top-ranked program--with good reason. I know I will learn a lot from them and find much to emulate.

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