What the Students Say

Chapter 6 - Teaching Technology for Community
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

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Every semester, the students have reported that the strongest feature of Technology for Community is the multidisciplinary project groups. Engineers rarely have the opportunity to interact with fine arts or journalism majors in their usual coursework. The students come to recognize the diverse strengths of their project teammates and the variety of contributions those teammates are able to make to the project. The students also report that the biggest challenge of the course is learning to deliver a usable technical product to someone with little or no technical background. Not only must the features of the product match the abilities of the users, but also the students must find ways to present those features clearly to the users. Even the liberal arts majors in the course have grown up with some exposure to computers, while not all of their clients and product users have. For most, successfully finding language that allows the students of different majors to communicate with each other and their community service partners represents the biggest accomplishment of the course.

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