A few things came together today to make me think about the term hacker . The book of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, David Warlick's post Learner as Hacker and an email from a colleague all caused me to reflect on the term, that to your average person views as a negative thing. The colleague was asking about a friend's email being hacked - just wondering if she had to worry about anything. I didn't think much of it until I came across Warlick's post on "learning as the practice of hacking." Excellent stuff, with a great deal of quotable lines on the parallels between hacking and how we need to prepare students today for life-long learning. When Woz was putting together boards with the Homebrew Computer Club , he thought of himself as a hacker, but then there was no negative conotation with the term. In his letter to prospective shareholders a new generation of hacker, Mark Zuckerberg writes about the bad rap: The word "hacker" has an unfairl