Many people are still writing their reflections on 2014. (Highly recommended: Stephen Downes’ “A Year in Photos.”) And there continue to be some very interesting reflections on that late December ed-tech event, the #FedWikiHappening (from Frances Bell, from Jenny Mackness, from Tim Klapdor, from Alyson Indrunas, for example).

We’re only 10 days into 2015, so many folks are still penning their looks-forward for the new year, for the future. I wrote about why I hope wearables are not a “hot new trend.” Here’s Marguerite Duras (by way of Antoine Wojdyla and Alexis Madrigal) predicting what the 2000s will hold:

“In the 2000s, there will be only answers. The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers, in fact. I believe that man will be literally drowned in information, in constant information. About his body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure.”

This week, it doesn’t feel like we have “only answers.” It doesn’t feel like we have any. Answers and assertions and rights and rhetoric and speech – it’s all in crisis right now. At once emptied and overdetermined. It already had been, of course, but the gunmen’s rampage through the Charlie Hebdo offices have made it seem all the more stark. (Read Teju Cole’s “Unmournable Bodies.”)

So what does education and ed-tech offer us? More standardization? More test prep? Corporate sponsorship and corporate control? A reinforcement of traditional roles or conservative values? A new nexus of entitlement?

How do we, as Dave Cormier writes, “solve for the problem of education in 2015?” How do we reclaim and rebuild? Can, as Yasmin Nair writes, “academics finally agree to stand in solidarity with the workers who keep their enterprise running, hopefully in terms shorn of the usual affective talk about the sheer saltiness and heroism of ‘ordinary workers’ that is cringe-inducing, counterproductive, condescending, and anti-intellectual”?

We can hope. (We can, I’d say, do more than hope. We can act and speak and write.) Meanwhile, we can watch this baby panda play in the snow for the first time.

Yours in struggle, ~Audrey