SLS-8c3 Technology-enhanced/driven/facilitated Service-Learning (TxSL)

It is popular to classify SL into 4 major types: Direct, Indirect, Research and Advocacy.  There is at least one major type that seems to be under-represented in service-learning communities such as IARSLCE - those that are technology-based.  These are typically carried out by hard science and engineering disciplines.  For example, those carried out at engineering departments at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, Imperial College, …  Many of these projects may or may not be classified explicitly as service-Learning.  Yet they are (1) carried out as applications of engineering to address needs of the disadvantaged in the community, and (2) they are academic learning activities with clear learning objectives, often in the form of courses carrying academic credit.  Hence they are certainly legitimate service-learning.  

For some reason, their results are not often presented and published in conferences such as IARSLCE.  More likely, they appear in conferences such as IEEE GHTC (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Global Humanitarian Technology Conference).  IEEE is the largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology.  It is strongly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and sees no place for hatred and discrimination in their communities.  A real life humanitarian project may include needs assessment, academic, governmental and community partnering, engineering economics, sustainability, community ownership, entrepreneurship, and long-term engagement.  Sample projects can include installation of solar panels to generate electricity, bicycle-powered electricity generator, solar-powered aquaponics, improved indoor/outdoor cooking stoves, a human-powered nebuliser, a wireless network for disaster relief, etc.  This type of service-learning is sometimes referred to as “technology-driven service-learning”.  Presumably the central role of technology in this type of service-learning may be the reason that researchers and practitioners in this area tend to come from engineering-related disciplines and gravitate towards conferences such as IEEE GHTC. 

Well designed engineering projects based on solid technology have proven to be able to make tremendous impact in the lives of disadvantaged communities.  For  villagers that have never had electrical power, that have been living all their lives around the availability (and unavailability) of natural sunlight - to now be able to work, cook, study, until late at night because of the electricity generated from the solar panels installed on the roofs of their own houses is obviously life-changing.  For villagers who have lived for all their lives with dysentery due to the lack of clean water to suddenly have access to cleaner water from a properly designed water filtration project carried out by well-trained students led by their professor is evidently life-saving.  That engineering service-learning can make such impact should not be surprising.  Engineering itself was invented and honed through centuries and centuries into a tremendous amount of expertise to put solid science in the service of mankind.  It is just that conventionally engineering knowledge is put to use by those who can afford it, but disadvantaged people cannot afford it.  If such expensively put together expertise can be put to use for the disadvantaged, the impact can certainly be huge.  

In the mean time, communities such as those around IARSLCE seems to focus more on the forms, methods, pedagogies, research frameworks, etc., and are populated more by researchers in disciplines such as education, humanities, social sciences, etc.  Very often, however, they do not have access to the professional, discipline-specific expertise to tackle many of the hard challenges faced by the disadvantaged.  It should be obvious there is potentially tremendous synergy between the researchers concentrating on the pedagogy of service-earning and those focusing on the technologies that can be applied to service-learning projects.  

On the other hand, service-learning has conventionally been regarded as a “high-touch” learning activity. Increasingly, technology has been used to enhance the interaction.  These include social media to facilitate group work, multi-media and game-like environments to enliven the interaction, augmented-reality and virtual reality to enrich the experience, and much more.  The social distancing imposed by the pandemic in 2020 made face-to-face, physical interaction practically impossible and forced much SL to be scaled back drastically or even cancelled.  At the same time, it created a vacuum into which technology can step in to play a much greater role in facilitating SL.  In some cases they almost completely replaced physical interactions.  We shall refer to this the of service-learning as “technology-facilitated service-learning”, and discuss it in more depth in a subsequent chapter.  

At PolyU we have benefited from our strong engineering and hard science backgrounds in our service-learning.  Professors have already created many SL courses where their expertise has been put to use tackling hard problems.  We have also been increasingly using technology to enhance the practice of service-learning: online teaching, STEM education, game-like tools to facilitate group work, video-conference-based global classrooms, virtual environments for hack-a-thons, …  These are the “Technology-driven/enhanced/facilitated Service-Learning’s” (TxSLs) where we will be investing a lot of our energy.