A Person-centered Guide to Demystifying Technology, 2nd Edition

A Person-Centered Guide to Demystifying Technology, 2nd Edition (2023)

In 2020 I released the first edition of my textbook. It was so excited to see the growing global reach it had, as many thousands of unique readers came to the site from nations in Southeast Asia and Africa, in addition to those in North America and Europe!

The feedback I received was so very helpful in identify core strengths, places that needed clarification, and aspects that might be added. As a result, the labor of love has continued with the fall 2023 release of a 2nd edition. It continues to be a work of reciprocity, working to bring together the many gifts shared with me over the years from my wonderful community partners over the last 2+ decades of work in community and with community, and now also the feedback from readers of the 1st edition.

I want to especially highlight two chapters that were fully rewritten. As with the 1st edition, the end of the Orange Unit includes a chapter introducing counterstorytelling. However, the techniques were based on past storytelling workshops I had done. I am pleased to note that Critical Archival Studies scholar Yingying Han offered to play a lead role in rewriting the core aspects of this chapter to better introduce social justice storytelling, incorporating some of my previous material to contextualize it to the flow of the textbook. I highly recommend your review of her work in Orange Unit 4A: Storytelling in the Information Sciences.

The book finishes with two final chapters in the Rainbow Unit working to bring the journey of the book to a reflective conclusion. In the first edition, I found that designing for justice wasn’t quite fully hitting the mark, with the modified chapter 4A: Recovering Community: Designing for Social Justice the result. And the concluding chapter, Community-Centered Design, was in need of a complete rewrite if it were to both bring closure to the journey and also provide inspiration for potential journeys to come. The new Rainbow Unit chapter 4B: Community-Centered Design: An Emergent Strategy for Community Organizing and Action was the result. Testing of these two chapters the last week of class this fall has given me hope it now meets my overall objectives for the end of the unit and the end of the book.

As with the first edition, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Your feedback is much appreciated as you enter into this material, and I look forward to examples in which this creative commons share-alike international is used as a helpful resource as you build your own creative works!

— Martin