How to Hack Traditional Learning Institutions with Open Web Ideas

"Hacking" is a big word in academe these days.   The terrific Chronicle of Higher Education blog "ProfHacker" offers "tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education."   THATCamp Virginia dedicated itself to creating an entire anthology of blog posts in a week, and then published it as a book Hacking the Academy, edited by the indefatigible Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt and asked the questions:  "Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?"   And now, as a community partner in the first international Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, November 3-5, HASTAC will be running a thread "How to Hack Traditional Learning Institutions with Open Web Ideas."  We can't wait!

A "hack" is a reconfiguration or reprogramming of a system to function in a way different than that built into it by its owner, designer, or systems administrator.   The term can run the gamut from a clever or quick fix to a messy (kludgy) temporary solution that no one's happy with.   It can refer to ingenuity and innovation--or sinister practices that border on the criminal.    We hope to avoid the kludge and don't plan on breaking any laws.   But reprogramming traditional learning institutions so they function in a different, more original, and more efficient way than is intended by current owners and administrators?   Sign me up!

When David Theo Goldberg and I came up with our incendiary definition of "institution" as a "mobilizing network," deconstructing the very solidity and uniformity of "institution" by emphasizing the potential for unruliness among its constituent members, we were hacking the institution.   We were saying that, as much as institutions develop structures and bureaucracies are designed to stabilize (which is to say minimize diversity and eccentricity), they never succeed in the end.  Collectives are collective.  Everything about the bureaucratic structuring of universities is designed to minimize how radically diverse we are as individuals constituting that bureaucracy but, in fact, we are all constantly contributing in ways that have little uniformity in the end.  "Institutions as mobilizing networks" was our empowering way of saying that an institution cannot contain and constrain all of the volatile energies of its constituent members.   We believe that.

So on to Drumbeat!  Registration is now open here:  http://www.drumbeat.org/festival/register.   It's going to an amazing, unruly event, a folk festival of ideas, many spontaneously organized, all contributing, we hope, to something transformative that we can carry home with us, wherever home might be.    Here are some of the threads we hope to generate while we are at Drumbeat:

How to Hack Grading and Assessment

How to Hack Your Syllabus

How to Hack a Curriculum

How to Hack Peer Review

How to Hack Disciplines

How to Hack Credentialing

How to Hack Tenure

How to Hack Scholarly Publishing

How?   We have no idea--but lots and lots of ideas.  And, at Drumbeat, we intend to find out how to mobilize those into practices that can change our institutions to serve us better in a digital age.   Join us for our "Colloquium on Radically Disruptive Academies."  (Thanks to Michelle for that perfect title!)

To register for the first international Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, Spain, Nov 3-5:    http://www.drumbeat.org/festival/register