[Announcement] HASTAC Scholars - Modeling a New Collective

I think there's only one post on this forum because the notion of the collective is so incredibly broad, especially compared to other HASTAC forum topics. It almost seems like the best use of this particular forum is to internally evaluate HASTAC's effectiveness. I'm still pretty new to HASTAC, so I can't really speak to this point!

I spend most of my time as a maker of art and technology-- visualizations, animations, physical computing, etc (see my work at http://dukode.com). Thinking about my years of participating in internet-based collectives, I would say that technical collectives have been most useful for me and my work. I consider a "technical collective" to be a space where technique can be improved. Some of my most frequented technical forums include

• http://stackoverflow.com (computer programming discussions)
• http://turbosquid.com (3D modeling and animation)
• http://discussions.apple.com
• http://instructables.com ("how-tos" of all kinds)
• http://code.google.com

When I was a student in the pre-Internet era, I learned techniques mostly through face-to-face interaction and a limited number of books. Now that the Internet is so available, I can learn techniques much more rapidly and in a much more personalized manner. For instance, I'm working on a personal project that involves iPhones and Bluetooth peripherals. With the internet, I was able to build a prototype in a few weeks, whereas pre-Internet this task may have taken months or even years. It was also possible to build this prototype quite cheaply, without expensive classes or materials.

On the other hand, while Internet-based technical collectives have encouraged incredible DIY movements, they do not replace the rigor, discipline, and structure imparted by traditional education to a person and his/her technical skills. Many self-taught technicians, myself included, can be rather messy in their technical output-- we copy/paste, we hack, we mashup. This can be disastrous when it comes to making things, particularly infrastructural things that need to support populations. In this repsect, traditional education will never, and should never, go away!

One of the appeals of HASTAC as a collective for me is the sense that it provides venues, such as the HASTAC Scholars forums, for conversations that span institutions.  Traditionally academic conferences have served this function.  More recently bulletin boards, listservs, and blogs.  The former played the role of the annual concentrated infusion of intense exchange, that periodic reminder of the vitality of the discipline and the hassle of travel reimbursement, but the latter, these online collectives epitomized by HASTAC, are creating fields of study through continuous synchronous (via Twitter) and asynchronous conversational exchange (and coveted monetary prizes).

On the one hand, the collective addresses some of the isolation of academia.  By necessity, sholars are often the only specialist in their area in their department.  Graduate students, working under them, can experience a similar, and more vulnerable, feeling of separation and isolation.  The online collective is that perisistent community.

But something else appeals to me about this particular collective -- even though it seems to be moored at Duke, its membership goes far beyond any institution, especially when looking at the shear amound of traffic the site receives (http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/becoming-public-intellectual) and the extensive participation in its forums. I saw this most acutely in the Critical Code Studies forum (http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/critical-code-s...) which reached 12000 reads and over 100 challenging and thoughtful comments.  Keep in mind, CCS is an area of study only a few years old with no particular institutional ties, no particular university setting.  It is a collective called forth by venues (the CCS Working Group, a blog,the  CCS @ USC conferene, ebr, HASTAC, Thoughtmesh).  Similarly, the so-called "digital humanities" is emerging, as far as I can tell, through the nuturing of these trans-instituional online communties.  Again, perhaps this was always the way with emerging fields, but I can't help but think the rate and strength with which DH is forming is deeply tied to these online collectives -- whether self-organizing or more structured.

When I think about the future of academic institutions, these types of online collectives strike me as vital both in their transformative nature and in their invigorating energy.  The conversations rival (and often surpass) the seminars offered at most institutions.  And while I don't desire moving to online-only eduation or even the dissolution of the organizations that employ or educate us, I can sense a way in which these collectives are becoming sites where new kinds of seminars emerge (e.g. this DMLcentral webinar http://bit.ly/ebSIzV), reading groups spontaneously autogenerate, flashmob focus groups flourish, and curricula forms through the power of the exchange of the minds who show up, login in, and post up, attending this ethereal un-university via iPad, smartphone, laptop even as they sit on benches on campuses dreaming of a space beyond ivy and brick and tall metal gates.

Sometimes I tell my students that when smart people leave school, they continue their studies at TED Talks.  I should add online collectives.  These collectives are emerging into new kinds of educational structures, not as easy to map as the college campus, and perhaps more akin to microclimates or trasnational fads or global waves of musical styles.  It's more than memes, more than tools, more than the institutions we grew up wth.  It's reggae, ripped jeans, Etsy, and open, wide open.

I really appreciate the process of reconceptualizing the collective and how it fits with education in the post-internet era. While I am intrigued with the question of how we, as education policy makers, thinkers and tinkerers, can function as a collective with the power to effectuate change, I would urge the conversation to move even further to what it means for education to have students function as a learning collective, and educators.

The concept of a social learning network of students and educators is only possible in today's Web2.0 networked world. And I am not talking only about a class-wide network, but a collective made up of students from different schools, states and even nations. What would this do to the way we think about learning? The role of the educator? The role of the students as active participants in their own learning?

For us at the World Wide Workshop, this is what the future of education will look like, and this is a model we are implementing and assessing everyday with the Globaloria Social Network for Learning Game Design - www.Globaloria.org. 

With Globaloria, students are honing STEM skills and digital literacies, problem solving and engaging in deep research and analysis collaboratively, daily for 90-minutes, as part of their formal school curriculum, using an online, open-sourced wiki and blog-based learning platform. They are posting their works-in-process and final projects, sharing their work process, and mashing, remixing and commenting on students across the newtork in nearly 50 schools in 2 states.

You can see the results of this new collective-based view of learning in our research, www.WorldWideWorkshop.org/Reports/ - it works. 

So my question would be to consider the impact of a collective, collaborative, network-based approach to education made up of diverse students and educators...and what we as the HASTAC collective can learn from it.

Amber