Reclaiming "Hacker"

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 unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. 

Hacking is just problem solving. These are two very low-order examples of hacking as learning to solve problems. As I was typing this there was nothing on the toolbar in Blogger that looked like I could do a block quote indent, so I Googled the code and found what to put into the html. Or this morning, someone's iMovie was failing on export every time. A little investigation let me know a title called "Organic Main" was the culprit. Sure enough, got that out and now the export is working just fine. Both these small things, but examples of finding a way beyond the textbook to get things done. After spending the last 21 months back in higher education I'm finding time to dive into topics I didn't have the time for before - economics, gaming and education, accounting. Now I look for online tutorials that explain concepts, iTunes U courses and good old fashion books. When you think about it, higher ed is just a books and library reserve materials with discussions. Can't you reflect on things on your own or discuss with others via a blog? With colleagues? There may be no college credit in it and you lack a person who is financially responsible to aid your learning, but I think you can master concepts all the same if you're motivated.

We should be working to create classrooms of hackers who work for the classe's and their own intellectual good. Does something interest you? Go out and find out about it! Do you wonder how something works? There's probably a library book, a free book online or YouTube video that explains it. This is where the facilitation element of education comes in, teachers who help students build a robust intuition on how to find what they need. It doesn't just have to be the library media specialist, although that's a great person to start with.

From a curriculum perspective we need to move toward homebrew curriculums based on the best resources out there. Will it take a lot of work? Of course it will, but we need to find time for teachers to start building their own....becoming hackers to teach future hackers. My main worry is that it seems like less of the day is being committed to collaboration and development. While a trending thing to proclaim "we're doing Professional Learning Communities," the trend seems to be more time in front of kids to mend budget gaps.

Motivation, mentioned above is a key piece of this as well. As I've found with teaching and parenting, saying its important isn't the same as the child/student feeling it's important. That involves a different skill set that Warlick alludes to...

I taught my students about inventions and inventors, but I should have told the stories of how he or she did that, about how he hacked those filaments and electricity...Those stories need to be told, admired and emulated and they need to be an integral part of our classroom conversations.

Tell the story how Woz and Jobs built the Apple, how Einstein arrived at his theory of relativity, how Churchill or JFK made gut-wrenching decisions. We all want to Be of Use, so spark the imagination by telling the stories of how these great inventions or events came to be. Compelling storytelling isn't a generational thing...it just may need to be available in a few different mediums to reach all audiences.

This weekend I also started Tony Wagner's Creating Innovators. I suspect some of this will run parallel with what he has to say about educating a future workforce full of creators, tinkerers and hackers to solve the world's problems.