Change, Change, Change

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  You can't stop change.  And I don't want to.  I feel it in the air, not only in the Obama campaign, but in disgust at business  as usual, at the lies, at the deception, at the prejudice, at the greed.  And I feel it in attitudes towards education.  In our public schools, more and more kids, parents, teachers, and administrators have had enough of No Child Left Behind that leaves 35% of our children behind (up to 80% in some of our poorest urban areas).   We're #17 in the world in the educational attainment of our population.  Appalling.  That's gotta change.  

And on the university-level too.  We need change.  A recent study emphasizes that high school kids who are college-bound are literally driving themselves sick, leading themselves into nervous and physical breakdowns, to acquire the right credentials to get into the right colleges.  Top universities like Harvard and Yale now have only an 8% acceptance rate.  Everyone wants to be on top, the NeoLiberalist Lucky 1% that controls 90% of wealth trickling down to the ambitious high school set and their parents.  

That's untenable.  There are a world of pressing social issues and youth have great ideas how to address them.  It is a great age of science and youth deserve smart teachers who can teach them creativity and exploration so they can contribute (and at all levels, not just that ambitious top 1%).  

In the HASTAC realm, an area that needs changing is interdisciplinarity and also more responsive adaption of new technologies to learning.  Universities spend millions on IT, often on systems (oh, I hate Blackboard!) that are extremely expensive, clunky, and help no one in furthering real learning.  They also spend millions on IT that goes underused.  Yet in really examining the basis and means of education, using technology to make intellectual communities that require new epistemologies, new ideas of authorship, new collaborative skills, a new sense of problem-solving and learning as a process:   not so much.  We're way, way behind in finding ways to use the astonishing information age social networking tools available worldwide to bring the energy of the world's intellectual community to bear in the classroom.

But we have a start.  One reason HASTAC is working hard this year to decentralize, with its cadre of fifty or so HASTAC Scholars reporting on and commenting on what is happening in their world, is we know there are young people out there, not yet socialized into the professions or into higher education, who have fantastic insights on where education should be headed.   And how.  We want to learn.  We want to change.  It is time. 

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--Special thanks to Swaheel for the beautiful photographs shared on Flickr.  Please click on the image for more of Swaheel's photostream and full documentation.