MAS.968 – Call for Action – a mobile course

I caught wind of this on one of the feeds while I was away, so I checked out the syllabus:

Call for Action (CfA) is an intensive studio seminar on contemporary technologies and activism. How can mobile networked devices be used for social change, politics, and expression? Can Web2.0 techniques be applied to help to organize people, gather information, and enable collective action to stop global warming? organize labor? end a war?

Each week we will review existing tools for social change, cover techniques for mobile hacking, and piece together new experiments. International speakers ranging from Zimbabwean activists to telecommunication experts will discuss the problems with existing ICTs, and suggest parameters for new systems. We will explore protocols and packages like VOIP, SMS, and Asterisk to look at how they may be reused or reconfigured. And we will do a variety of hacking and technical exercises that can demystify the field and act as springboards for future work.

Wow, a course that is looking at how contemporary tools, specifically the ubergadget, can be used to change the world. The pity is that this is a grad course. So in theory, students would need to learn everything else about the world before they can change it. Something about this doesn’t fit right with me. I think that there should be, as part of the ICT curriculums of the world, courses starting when kids are 8 to look at not only how to use the computers that sit on a desk, but those that fit in the pocket as well.

We are not doing right by our kids making them wait until grad school to find out how to change the world, we should start giving them the tools as soon as we can.