Hi everyone! Quick reminder that for tomorrow's Change seminar (May 9th), we will be hearing from Rebecca M. Jonas (she/her). Rebecca's talk is titled "Centering Culture in Digital Literacy Education: Lessons from Rural Appalachia".
*Description* In building and deploying a digital storytelling system to teach digital literacy skills to rural Appalachians, we discovered key opportunities and challenges to promoting digital literacy in this region. We identified that the importance of storytelling in Appalachian culture made digital storytelling an effective means of teaching these skills to residents. However, the poor technology infrastructure at our study site posed challenges to our participants’ ability to use technology and learn new skills. In this talk, I will discuss key findings from a digital literacy research intervention in a small, rural Appalachian community. I will also present preliminary findings from ongoing ethnographic research on digital access and skills in the Appalachian region. This work highlights the unique culture of Appalachia and how culture can be taken into account to improve the efficacy of technology interventions. *Seminar Details* *Location*: Tuesdays from 12-1pm in 271 CSE2 (The Bill and Melinda Gates Center) *Zoom:* https://washington.zoom.us/j/93100061611 <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/washington.zoom.us/j/93100061611__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!jLJRdcRiY3moGftAfI2tKd830IN_o6aaIpd50l7QTSaufUz7DDxsbdqGg6ZBKiJ6DZsrD6cWm0NJtD4y81ZEmg$> *Presenter Bio* Rebecca is a PhD candidate in the Penn State Informatics program studying human-computer interaction and social + organizational informatics under advisement of Dr. Kelley Cotter <https://kelleycotter.com/>. She primarily employs qualitative methods to gain a deep, nuanced understanding of how people interact with technology. She is particularly interested in rural computing and understanding the unique experiences of rural technology users. In her dissertation research, she investigates intra-rural digital divides, which are digital inequalities present between and within rural communities. She is also developing and evaluating digital literacy education that is informed by cultural tenets of rural Appalachia. She is invested in understanding the ways that technology creates and perpetuates injustice and aims to remediate those injustices through transformative approaches to technology. Towards this goal, she is a member of the Liberatory Tech Scholars Community <https://sites.psu.edu/crittech/liberatory-tech-scholars/> at Penn State where she works with a group of interdisciplinary scholars to engage with the Black radical tradition to reimagine and develop new systems. Best, UW Change Organizers
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