Developing an Online Community for Women in Computer and Information Sciences: A Design Rationale Analysis

Abstract

We analyze the evolutionary design of an online community system designed to support a developmental learning community of women: wConnect Online. The goal of this community is to engage, connect and support women at different developmental levels with respect to education and career goals in the computer and information sciences. We chronicle the system's development as an instance of action design research, showing how a sequence of four design phases were motivated by different design goals that led to systems with differing design rationales. After motivating the research program, we describe each design phase in detail, followed by a general synthesis and discussion of lessons learned.

Supporting activity awareness in computer-mediated collaboration

“…As a result, supporting activity awareness within wConnect is an important requirement for the tools that we have built and continue to refine [20]. Our toolset is diverse, recognizing the multi-faceted goals and activities of community members at different phases: customized "programming" tools for use by high school students; extensions to the Facebook social networking platform for new members; and online community authoring tools for the more advanced members of the community.…”

Encouraging Women in CS 1: Interventional Inclusive Pedagogy in Computer Science

“…In the fall semester of 2015 the above-mentioned interventions were applied to the CS1(CS1511) course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The first intervention involved creating a Facebook discussion group [14,25] with students willing to participate in this study intervention. The students were invited to a closed Facebook group named Free Talk Zone monitored by a student mentor, during which any of the group members were able to add new members to the group.…”

“…The research question is: Can small interventions such as changing the problem statements and offering an avenue to socially interact increase the interests of women in computer science? Hypothesis Hypothesis 1: Engaging students via social media can offer an avenue to interact and help increase interest in CS [8,11,14,16,17,18,19,20].…”