Cathy Davidson: TechnoTravels/Telemobility, HASTAC on the Move
Filed at 9:00 am on June 9, 2008 • Leave a comment
HASTAC’s co-founder reflects on the highlights of their recent conference: education, inspiration, curiosity, and awe.
A musician and sound engineer who is head of technology at one of the major technology universities is in an intense conversation about cognition and information flows with an English teacher, a director of a humanities institute, a computer programmer, and a media arts student. The setting is an art gallery where a dj live-mixes ‘80s music and art cascades off the walls (literally, a gorgeous videoscape of a waterfall). A lovely Medievalist in a pale paisley scarf walks into the conversation and soon the media flows and migrations we’re discussing are happening in the twelfth century, not the twenty-first. Someone else nearby is laughing about the fun of playing Byeong Sam Jeon’s laptop drums in the telematic drum circle and another person says they didn’t like the virtual member of the circle going so hard on the snare drums, disrupting the rhythms and making it hard to collaborate musically. And we haven’t even seen or heard the musical pogo-stickers yet!
This is happening at the reception after Day 1 of the HASTAC conference, TechnoTravels: HASTAC on the Move.
As with the first HASTAC conference, HASTAC 2008 was a mix of demos, keynote addresses, and papers plus lightning-talks and performances. There was even a three-hour bus tour from UC-Irvine to UCLA (the two sites of the conference) in which historian Norman Klein told of the migratory, technological, economic, and social history of the suburbs and the city, with a detour through Long Beach, the second largest port in the U.S. Education and social issues were also everywhere. One of my favorite conversations was with Allison Clark, of the seedbed initiative at University of Illinois, who has been researching the erasure of the term “digital divide” from government documents. Has the digital divide itself truly been eradicated-or only the term? That is the research project she hopes to embark upon next, and HASTAC will be involved.
The point: what an inspiration to be able to step out of the silos of academe, the discourses within discourses, and spend three days imagining the many ways of learning and contributing to those ways even as we are being inspired by them.
Curtis Wong, in a preview of the new World Wide Telescope, emphasized that it is not just about the science but the stories we tell about the science. The World Wide Telescope allows anyone to make a story through the solar systems and tell that story on the interactive interface. Caren Kaplan asked in the audience if one story you could tell about the skies was militaristic. Remember the “Star Wars” of the Reagan Era, she asked? Caren and I talked later about how intriguing it would be to teach a course using the World Wide Telescope and having students add that recent social and military history to the inspiring images of the endless sky.
John Seely Brown said in the video shown by Curtis Wong that “awe” was what he felt when he toured the World Wide Telescope with Curtis. Later, when I talked with Curtis, we talked about how all education, on any level, has to be about that inspiring of curiosity that, in a word, is “awe.” When we think of our best teachers, we never think of the ones who trained us on how to achieve the best percentages for this or that kind of multiple choice test, on how you second guess a test to get the best score. We remember the ones who inspired us to think creatively and critically, to engage the world with insatiable curiosity. We remember those teachers (inside the classroom and out) who inspired us to want to know all we could about the world, who inspired us to awe.
HASTAC 2008 felt inspiring in that way and critical thinking, deep engagement, and testing and questioning of technology and its role in our society were crucial to that sense of “awe.” Creativity and critical thinking go together in HASTAC. We believe one reason to be an educator is to teach critical skills so our students can separate chicanery from inspiration, cheap flash from real brilliance. Critical thinking, in other words, is the opposite of a knee-jerk cynicism.
Technotravels, telemobility. What a trip! (Pun intended.) Thank you, organizers of HASTAC 2008. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, you can catch some of the flavor from the various blogs and photos posted during the conference, all available at http://www.hastac.org.
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