Evolutionary design of a developmental learning community

In the United States, young women continue to turn away from education that would prepare them for careers in the information technology (IT) workforce. Researchers studying this phenomenon have identified a wide range of contributing factors, including the career attitudes and guidance of family members, friends and mentors; curricular approaches to teaching software development skills; and well-entrenched stereotypes of IT professionals as anti-social "geeks." I describe a research project that explored a community-oriented approach to attracting and retaining women in our own College's IT education program. Our design goal was to seed and support the evolution of a multi-leveled emergent community pursuing its own developmental trajectory, with a focus on the online community for wConnect - a system that hosts a variety of online activities and communication options. In this talk, I will chronicle the system's development as an instance of action design research, showing how a sequence of four design phases were motivated by evolving design goals that led to systems with differing design rationales. I conclude with a synthesis and discussion of lessons learned, including design implications for online tools aimed at building and supporting developmental learning communities.