International Conference on Service-Learning

With the Social Innovation Hackthon, we opened our third International Conference on Service-Service-Learning.  The conference continues to grow: more people submitting papers, the quality of the papers improve, more people attending (~200 from 20+ countries), …

Again we have Andrew Furco - a pioneer and now an elder in the community - speaking on research.  He is always a favourite, because of his scholarship as well as his unceasing effort to help to build up the community, linking diverse groups together, and unassuming demeanour.  In March, we will ask him to come back to Hong Kong to work with us on a number of research problems. 

Matthew Johnson from Brown University - one of the most respected centers of excellence in the community - spoke about partnership, particularly in the international arena, and the transformations - including that of the institution engaged in service-learning itself. In this community, the desirable transformation results in the institution being more engaged with the community.  I have to wonder whether this is also a desirable goal of the management in many prestigious universities and those who are focused on the climbing the ranking ladders.  

Besides the tow keynote speeches, we also have two interesting panel discussions.  One of which discussed the linkage between service-learning and the academic disciplines, such as business, engineering, health, …   For some, such as health, the linkage seem more obvious to most people.  For some, such as engineering, it is more of a challenge, even though it shouldn’t be: engineering is the application of science to solve problems, it should be natural for students to learn to apply engineering methods to societal problems such as energy, clean water, …  For business, some recent data has indicated that students who went through a business / economics education may actually turned more selfish. It is quite alarming and service-learning may be a method to address that.  

There are also some interesting workshops and many many good paper presentations.  One workshop that I attended explore issues of identity, warming up the audience by asking them to swap identities.  

Many people stayed until the very end of the conference, an encouraging indication that the people enjoyed the conference.  

There are many signs that the community in this region is growing.  And we are glad that we are playing a role in it.  We could not have envisioned this when we started our program in 2000.