MacArthur Foundation

Youth Led Tech Curriculum: Typing Club

Christopher WhitakerJuly 27, 2015

As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching various classes on digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum through a series of blog posts. As we’ve progressed into the program, we received numerous requests from instructors and youth on activities to improve typing skills. To do this, we used a program called Typing Club which we’ll discuss below. We’ve featured this app before as part of our Connect Chicago work.

As we developed the curriculum for Youth-Led Tech, we hadn’t fully considered the basics. We drove through our lessons, which are focused on how to use WordPress to make websites for yourself and others. But we found that many youth needed more work on keyboarding skills. Since we had previously learned about TypingClub from our friends at Connect Chicago, we started an account there and set up the youth there and we now include practice nearly every day.

Introduction to TypingClub.com

TypingCub is a program that allows staff to monitor how the students are doing in real time so that staff can move over to help if they needs to. The app also keeps track of students progress throughout the course. Here’s Rene Paccha from the Spanish Coalition for Housing explaining more.

How TypingClubs Works

TypingClub is a free online program anyone can register for regardless of if they’re in a training course or not. The course has a hundred different lessons aimed at improving the users typing skill to 90 words per minute. Users can take the lessons as many times as they like with the goal of getting three ‘stars’ per level.

For schools and digital skill trainers, Typing Club has additional features to help trainers manage their programs. While students can use the software for free, to use the tool as a trainer you pay for the cost per students (about $2.60 annually per student license.)

When you sign up as a school, you get a custom domain address ( yourschool.typingclub.com) that you can send your students to. When your students arrive at your page they can register to take classes and access the content you’ve provided. As an administrator, TypingClub allows you to set up lessons plans, assign additional instructors and set up typing tests. The software also allows you to view your students progress in real time so you can walk over to the student if they’re having issues.

How to get Typing Club

For individuals, they can simply start working right away on typingclub.com without registering for the site. Registration is only necessary to be part of a class or to keep track of progress.

For schools , you can register for a free trial on the TypingClub School Page.

In practice as part of Youth Led Tech

Every day the youth spend about one hour on Typing Club. We tend to do this in the middle of the day to allow staff a chance to catch up on things. At least one staff member will monitor the youth’s progress on Typing Club to make sure that the youth are on the right site.

Digital Learning Environments: Association House in Humboldt Park

Smart ChicagoJuly 27, 2015

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Association House of Chicago at 1116 N. Kedzie Ave. Chicago IL 60651 is a large connected complex of services in the heart of Humboldt Park.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Association House of Chicago serves a multi-cultural community by providing comprehensive, collaborative and effective programs in English and Spanish. We promote health and wellness and create opportunities for educational and economic advancement.

Service areas include El Cuarto Año High School, a technology center (run by longitme Conenct Chicago member Stephen Pigozzi) with classes in English and Spanish, and a comprehensive Family Literacy Program.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from the large cafeteria of Association House. It’s a huge area set off from the rest of the building, which gives us lots of bust-out room for creativity and learning.

Youth-Led Tech at Association House of Chicago

There is lots of space to store food, which makes it easier to manage breakfast and lunch five times a week.

Morning Time, Youth-Led Tech, Humboldt Park

The chairs and tables are easy to move. Lots of instruction occurs in presentation and discussion format. We have our own projector. Youth-Led Tech, Humboldt Park

The Association House partners with Americorps to deliver all sorts of digital skills training.

Americorps | Association House of Chicago

They run dozens of programs throughout the year:

Association House of Chicago

The enormous park across the street provides lots of bust-out room when it’s time to turn off computers!

Portraits, Youth-Led Tech, Humboldt Park

Bonus: here’s a video I made of my visit:

Join the Connect Chicago Network

Denise LinnJuly 23, 2015

Across Chicago, people are doing amazing things to boost digital skills and increase access to technology. They are teaching seniors to use a mouse for the first time. They are are teaching people how to create resumes, create LinkedIn accounts, and apply for jobs online. They are lending out laptops and WiFi hotspots. They are teaching kids to build websites. This work is important because being on the wrong side of the digital divide can impact a Chicagoan’s economic and educational opportunities.

Connect Chicago aims to insert community into the valuable, existing efforts scattered all around the city. Are you a trainer in a computer lab? A volunteer in a library? Running a Meetup group on coding? Running a tech program for entrepreneurs? If so, you’re a member of Chicago’s digital access & skills ecosystem and we want to know who you are. We want to shine light on your stories and successes. With your help, we can begin to understand this system’s collective impact. If you are a participant in Chicago’s digital inclusion ecosystem, tell us who you are and tell us about your work!

To tell us more about you, fill out the Connect Chicago Network – Individual Form. You can also join our LinkedIn Group and come to the Connect Chicago Meetup events.

To tell us about a program or project you work or volunteer for, fill out the Connect Chicago Network – Project Form.

Digital Learning Environments: Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros in North Lawndale

Smart ChicagoJuly 19, 2015

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros at 3415 W. 13th Pl. Chicago IL 60623 is a bustling place with meeting rooms, a gym, a stage, a computer center, a community garden, and a world of joy inside and out.

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

The mission of Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is to empower children and teens to recognize and experience their possibility and promise. Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is proud to be part of this community. Named after one of its largest supporters, the Polk Bros. Foundation, CYC – ABC Polk Bros. Youth Center was one of the original three centers to form CYC in 1956. Well-trained youth-development specialists give individual support to nearly 400 children and teens each year to help them reach their potential, academically, socially and professionally. The center also runs a food pantry on the first Saturday of each month in partnership with New St. John Missionary Baptist Church. CYC gives members the tools, support and guidance they need to reach their full potential through the following age-specific programs: Early Childhood Education, School-Age Child Development, Teen Leadership Development, and Summer Fun.

The Early Childhood program is of special interest to those of us at Smart Chicago, since we created and run the Chicago Early Learning portal.

Chicago Early Learning!

Here’s their detail page, and an excerpt:

CYC ABC Early Childhood mission is to invest in youth in underserved communities in Chicago to help them discover and realize their full potential. Our program specialty is in the area of science. Children enrolled in our program will participate in a Green Living Recycling Project to protect the environment. Children will utilize their school readiness skills in all areas inclusive of math, science and literacy as they embark on creating and implementing a recycling station in their classroom community. Children will learn about how packaging waste, including glass, aluminum, plastics, metals and paperboard contribute significantly to annual waste totals, along with yard trimmings. Children will learn recycling involves taking materials that would normally be discarded as waste and giving them a new life. Children will use their problem solving skills to create their own toys and inventions through recycling. Family Engagement in the program supports the involvement of parents and community partnerships toward achieving the school readiness outcomes.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from a basement office that is cool and inviting when the hot summer sun is shining bright.

Youth-Led Tech, Summer 2015, North Lawndale

The 24 youth in our program gather around three tables and a bench. We have plenty of outlets and room for our daily breakfast and lunch deliveries. Each of the participants have their own brand-new laptop, which are secured each night in a cabinet we had delivered to the site. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible while using as few of the resources at the location as we can. The gym is a huge resource— the kids love it and they’re able to use it after their morning lesson and right before lunch.

Gym Time, Youth-Led Tech, Summer 2015, North Lawndale

There’s also a stage for performances.

Gym Time, Youth-Led Tech, Summer 2015, North Lawndale

Breakfast and lunch is delivered daily and any extra is shared with other programs in this busy facility.

Breakfast

There is a long, lush garden in the lot just to the east of the center, and some of the youth love to roam it over their breaks.

Garden at Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros. Gym Time, Youth-Led Tech, Summer 2015, North Lawndale

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros provides a rich and diverse learning environment for digital skills in Chicago.

Bonus: here’s a video I took of my visit:

City of Chicago Tech Plan Update

Smart ChicagoJune 25, 2015

At Techweek, City of Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman announced an 18-month update to Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Chicago’s first Tech Plan was first launched in 2013 and laid out a strategy to establish Chicago as a national and global center of technological innovation.

Since it’s launch, Chicago’s civic technology community has made significant progress towards the goals of the tech plan.

As a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology, Smart Chicago is proud to be heavily involved in the implementation of Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Here are some highlights from the update.

Next Generation Infrastructure

Chicago is working with internal and external partners to improve the speed, availability, and affordability of broadband across the city. The City is preparing to create a Request for Proposal for companies to design, construct, implement, and manage a gigabit-speed broadband network.

In addition to broadband infrastructure, the city is also working to digitally connect it’s infrastructure. Part of this includes the launch of The Array of Things project which will place network of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. (You can listen to their presentation at Chi Hack Night here.) You can already get up to the hour updates on beach conditions thanks to sensors maintained by the Chicago Park District. The Department of Innovation and Technology has loaded the information onto their data portal.

Make Every Community a Smart Community

One of the major efforts of the civic technology community in Chicago is closing the digital divide in every neighborhood.

Much of the work in the coming months will focus on Connect Chicago. This citywide effort, led by Smart Chicago in partnership with LISC Chicago, Chicago Public Library, World Business Chicago, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology aligns citywide efforts to make Chicago the most skilled, most connected, most dynamic digital city in America.

Here’s more from the Tech Plan about the program:

As part of this initiative, program partners are creating a profile of a fully connected digital community that can be used as a benchmark and will provide best-practice toolkits and other resources to help all Chicago communities reach this benchmark.

If you’re interested in getting involved in – you should reach out or join the Connect Chicago Meetup!

Another big part of the City’s strategy to close the digital divide in Chicago involves the Chicago Public Library. Libraries around the city already function as public computing centers and now they provide Internet to Go – a program where residents can check out laptops and 4G modems so that they can access the internet at home.

The City of Chicago and the civic tech community is also heavily focused not only access, but on digital skills. The Chicago Public Library’s Cybernavigator Program is set to be expanded and Chicago Public School is working on implementing computer science curriculum at all schools.

On our end, Smart Chicago is working with Get In Chicago to run a youth-led tech program this summer. The conceptual model for this program is “youth-led tech”, which means teaching technology in the context of the needs & priorities of young people. Youth will learn how to use free and inexpensive Web tools to make websites and use social media to build skills, generate revenue, and get jobs in the growing technology industry. They will also learn about all sorts of other jobs in tech— strategy, project management, design, and so on.

Effective Government

The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is also making great progress in using data to help city government be more efficient and effective. One of their first projects, WindyGrid, is a geospatial Web application designed by the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology that strategically consolidates Chicago’s big data into one easily accessible location. WindyGrid presents a unified view of City operations—past and present—across a map of Chicago, giving City personnel access to the city’s spatial data, historically and in real time, to better coordinate resources and respond to incidents.

The City of Chicago will be open sourcing the project later this year on their Github page.

That’s not the only open source project that the city has on the books. Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr recently spoke at Chi Hack Night to talk about their new system to predict the riskiest restaurants in order to prioritize food inspections. The system has found a way to find critical food safety violations seven days faster. Aside from the important aspect of less people getting sick from foodborne illness in the City of Chicago, there is another very important aspect of this work that has national impact. The entire project is open source and reproducible from end to end.

Since the release of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago has been working with the Chicago Department of Public Health on the Foodborne Chicago project. Foodborne listens to Twitter for tweets about food poisoning and converts them into city service requests. The Tech Plan update has some results from the project.

A study of the system, published by the Centers for Disease Control, found that during March 2013 – January 2014, FoodBorne Chicago identified 2,241 “food poisoning” tweets originating from Chicago and neighboring suburbs. The complaints identified 179 Chicago restaurant locations; at 133 (74.3%) locations, CDPH inspectors conducted unannounced health inspections. A total of 21 (15.8%) of the 133 restaurants reported through FoodBorne Chicago failed inspection and were closed; an additional 33 restaurants (24.8%) passed with conditions, indicating that serious or critical violations were identified and corrected during inspection or within a specified timeframe.

Chicago’s open data portal is also getting expanded as part of the updated Tech Plan having grown by more than 200 data sets over the last two years. Chicago was the first City to accept edits to select data sets through the City’s GitHub account.

Open311 is also getting an upgrade with the city undergoing a procurement processes to build a new 311 system. As part of the process for upgrading 311, the new system will go through user testing through the Civic User Testing Group.

Civic Innovation

A big part of the city’s strategy around civic innovation is supporting the work of civic technologists here in Chicago. As part of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago will continue to provide resources to civic technologists like developer resources, user testing, and financial support to civic technology projects.

The Tech Plan also calls out our work with the Chicago School of Data. The two day experience was wholly based on the feedback we received from dozens of surveys, months of interviews, and a huge amount of research into the work being done with data in the service of people. If you missed the conference, here are some of the key takeaways.

The Civic User Testing Group also plays a part in the Tech Plan and has recently been expanded to include all of Cook County.

Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman stated that Chicago has the strongest civic innovation community in the country. A large part of that community has been the Chi Hack Night, now in it’s fourth year with attendance now reaching over 100 people regularly.

Technology Sector Growth

One of the most thorny issues for civic technologist is the issue of government procurement. One of the things that the city has been doing is meeting with different groups to talk about ways the city can make it easier to buy products and services from smaller business and startups. (You can see Brenna Berman’s talk at the OpenGov Chicago Meetup here.)

As part of the Tech Plan, the City of Chicago is taking this on directly. Here’s the quote from the Tech Plan:

This summer, DoIT will release a Request for Qualifications for start-up and small-sized companies to join a new pool of pre-qualified vendors eligible for future City procurement opportunities. Companies who are deemed qualified will be placed into a pool and receive access to City contract opportunities in the areas of software application development and data analytics.

To further decrease the barriers facing smaller-sized companies in competing for City business, the City has modernized its insurance requirements to allow for pooled insurance plans. Start-ups that are members of an incubator, such as 1871, or smaller companies that come together for a group insurance plan, may now meet the City’s insurance requirements as a group. Insurance requirements were identified as a barrier to conducting business with the City in a series of listening sessions conducted over the past year with these companies.

This is a huge opportunity not only for civic tech companies, but it will enable the city to take advantage of the innovation coming out of these companies.

You can read the full tech plan here.

Follow-up from On The Table 2015: Data Integrity for Small Businesses and Small Non-Profits

Andrew SeederMay 17, 2015

For On The Table 2015 I met with Heidi Massey and Ben Merriman over coffee and tea in the Loop. My idea for the conversation focused on creating an open consent form template — meaning, a web form users could finish and then export as a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), or a Data Sharing Agreement (DSA).

The different documents work in different contexts. Except when working with datasets protected by federal law (more on this later), calling an agreement between parties an MOU or a DSA is largely a matter of habit, while an NDA is a legally binding contract that says which types of confidential information should not be disclosed. Within legal limits, there’s nothing stopping you from writing agreements for your organization in the language and structure you prefer. Consider the purpose of the dataset, who has stakes in its integrity, and what might happen to the dataset in the future.

Often boilerplate NDAs and MOUs are kept filed by organizations. An employee, consultant, or another partner adds their details to the agreement. Both parties sign the agreement and each keeps a copy for themselves. The agreement acts as a promise that, essentially, data stays where it belongs. Violations end the data sharing relationship.

We saw problems with agreements whose force relies on the color of law and a CYA — Cover Your Ass — mentality. So we tried to imagine how the language of the agreements could promote a culture of shared best practices. The conversation followed Heidi’s idea that small nonprofits have more in common with small businesses than they do with very large nonprofits. Here’s a plain English outline for a data agreement which also works like a data integrity check list.

People who are working with shared data should understand:

How the data is formatted for use. This means organizing the dataset into simple tables and, for example, by using the same file type, naming conventions, and variable order.
The versions of the dataset. An original version of the dataset should be kept unmodified. Changes to the dataset should be made to a copy of the original version and documented in detail. The location of the original version of the dataset should be known but access restricted.
How long the data sharing agreement lasts. The dataset’s life cycle—how a dataset gets created, to where it can be transferred, and when, if at all, a dataset is destroyed–is just as important as a straightforward timeline for deliverables.
How to keep information confidential. Avoiding accidental violations of the data sharing agreement is easier when everyone who works with the dataset is familiar with its terms of use. It’s possible to define access permissions to datasets by using password protection and defining read/write roles for users. Data cleaning is a crucial part of this process to ensure that personally identifiable information is kept safe.
What costs come with sharing the data. This means being clear about who is in charge of updating the dataset, whether there are financial obligations associated with the data sharing process, and knowing risks associated with breaches. Federal law regulates the sharing of datasets about school children (FERPA), medical information (HIPPA), and vulnerable populations (IRBs).
Specific use requirements. This is the nitty-gritty of data sharing. Use requirements specify whether a dataset can be shared with third parties, what other data (if any) can be linked to the dataset, and what changes can be made to the dataset.

Ben has written extensively about the consent process as it relates to the genetic material of vulnerable populations. A vulnerable person — say, a prisoner, child, or an indigenous person — consents to give a sample of their genetic material to a researcher for a study. The genetic material gets coded into a machine readable format and aggregated into a dataset with other samples. The researchers publish their study and offer the aggregated dataset to others for study.

Image from Anne Bowser and Janice Tsai’s “Supporting Ethical Web Research: A New Research Ethics Review”. Copyright held by International World Wide Web Conference Committee: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2736277.2741654.

As it stands, though, there is no way for a person to revoke their consent once s/he gives away their genetic material. The dilemma applies not just to genetic material but any dataset that contains sensitive material. We thought people should have a say in what data counts as sensitive. An organization can limit how much data is shared in the first place. There are technical limitations and capacity limitations that stop people “in” datasets from having a voice during the dataset’s full life cycle.

For more information you can go to one of Smart Chicago’s meetups or review a list of informal groups here. The documentation is from last year’s Data Days conference as part of the Chicago School of Data project. There’s a large community in Chicago willing to teach people about data integrity. Check out Heidi’s resource list, which you can access and edit through Google.