We all know that humankind can’t draw breath without thinking up something new. We went from painting on cave walls to chiseling blocks of stone into beautiful sculptures to somehow having a blank white canvas praised as an artistic masterpiece. We went from mailing letters to telegraphing messages with Morse Code to transmitting our voices and faces across hundreds of miles in Zoom and FaceTime calls. Needless to say, advancement in technology is nothing new. But it has certainly been on the uptick in the past few decades. And right in the middle of all this is EAST. So now the question becomes: how is EAST staying relevant in this age of user-friendly tech?

The answer is found in our name itself: Education Accelerated by Service and Technology. EAST stays relevant by serving the community using these emerging technologies, rather than fighting against them. “You can make something as user-friendly as you want, but it’s still going to break. And when it breaks, people won’t know how to fix it,” says Jourdan Taylor, Coordinator of Information Technology at EAST. “We’re staying relevant because we’re training students to know how to fix it. When things break, EAST students are much more equipped to fix it than your average student.” 

Technology getting easier and more accessible isn’t all bad, either. The more user-friendly it gets, the easier it is to incorporate it into EAST classrooms and let students go wherever they can. “As the technology has gotten considerably easier, we have seen students be able to go farther and deeper,” observes Jerry Prince, EAST’s Vice President of IT. 

If you know how to fix something, you’ve suddenly become invaluable to whatever community you’re a part of. And if you can fix something, who’s to say that you couldn’t repurpose it to solve even more problems? Prince hits the nail on the head, saying “You know what the technology is designed to do. What can you do with it to solve problems that it isn’t designed to do?” The whole purpose of EAST is to solve problems using new and innovative technology. That means to go out of your comfort zone. Learn new things. “Be curious and don’t be afraid to break things,” says Taylor. “If you break something, figure out how to fix it.”

This ‘fix it’ mindset is exactly why EAST is still relevant. When most people see a problem, they say, “Oh, I wish someone would do something about that.” But when an EAST student sees a problem, they think, “How can I fix that?” EAST is a community of people who want to get things done, and that’s what the world needs in this day and age where everything comes at the push of a button. Prince comments that the main thing preventing students from using their critical thinking skills is “wanting the immediate result, and not having the discipline to get through to where you really need that tool to go.” Here at EAST, we take the long way and learn from it.

EAST is staying relevant, but it can only do that if everyone steps up. Reach out to your community. Find those problems that need solving. Learn a new skill. Teach someone you know about EAST and what it represents. Find some way to make a change, even if it seems tiny at the time. Everyone dreams about the ability to change the world, but we all have that ability. Take it in both hands and use it. Let’s change the world, one EAST student at a time. It starts with you.