#hacking education

What you should know for start hacking?

A friend of mine asked me what I was doing over the weekend, so, I explained I had started a non-profit called Free School Hackers.  And I quickly discovered that she found the concept very difficult to understand, and, she was unable to juxtaspose education with hacking. So, this post is for you Melanie.

Hacking is filled with negative connotations, but, the real meaning of the verb ‘to hack’ is not sinister. Even the urban dictionary appears confused. It has been made sinister by media, but the real meaning is really quite joyful.

Whatever you`ve heard about hackers, forget it. Hackers, especially education focused hackers like the writer, are always, always, trying to find the root of a problem. Indeed, our curiosity leads us to break stuff down, and along the way we can break relationships,just so we can keep asking the question of ourselves, of our place, of our friends and our colleagues - in search of the root.  We question everything, especially motives. And we are willing and eager to accept challenges, as an opportunity to fail, and fail again. We treat ourselves as iterations. A culmination of everything that has happened. And we know that ‘truth’ is a pliable term depending on trends, depending on semantic coercion.

So, ‘hacking education’ works like this.

As an English teacher, I like grammar, but, it gets boring. Where did it come from and how did it evolve? What are the new grammars?  So, we begin to compare grammars, like, Portuguese with English.  And as you can see, rather than accepting grammar as rules, as an English teacher does,  we trans-modify into a researcher, an analyst, making comparisons, and seeking new meanings. Juxtaposition with language, Portuguese and English, Portuguese and Spanish, English and German, etc and this juxtaposition, questioning, difference, leads us to new pathways, new connections and new synapse. Which increases the way our mind explores a problem. In the case of an English teacher (like me) we become generative grammarians, semantic players, etymologists. It leads us to dialects, to poetry. To languages, to code, to ways of expressing and breaking down the rules, the same rules that prevent us from finding truth and creativity. In my mind, truth is an opinion, and it doesn`t really exist, because it is built on information, collated at a point of time in the past, when the present has changed, and over time it changes, and distances itself from truth to become a lie - memorylessness, do you think?

Curiosity leads to problems, and dead-ends. In the form of patents, copyright, and other closed doors, that force us to choose alternative pathways. An education hacker isn`t interested in Microsoft or Google products for example, unless, we can look under the hood and inspect the contents.  The non sharing, closed shop mentality is not one we share, and is philosophically concerning, a mentality that sparks mistrust. So, by definition, companies, educators for profit with closed shop mentalities, are not educators, they`re charlatans in our mind. They may profess that they are, they may even believe that they are, but their motivation lies elsewhere. So, rather than even try to enter into a debate, we use open source products only. Because, open and free, provides opportunity for learning and growth. All of these ethical hacks, promote, use, and understand open source.

So, as you can see we are curious. And in the case of Free School Hackers, we are curious about pedagogy, and the question of ‘how we learn’. And we consider learning as a state, a philosophy of thought, and we distance our minds from the notion of certificates or diplomas, as they are a diversion, from what we are really trying to do. We believe education is an attitude, and we work to create curiosity, and inquisitive minds that can solve big problems, after all, education never ends, it`s a daily thing.

The method is pretty simple. Our method is based around the ideas shared by the educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, by Chomsky, by Bernard Russell and many others who share similar traits of logic, math, creativity, language, teaching and learning by questioning and self determination. And the belief that education is political. It has to be, if it is controlled by state. It can`t be anything else, as state is controlled by a philosophy, that in-turn control the education systems. Unfortunately, most are factories, not free, and they`re designed to produce a type of thinking,  within an environment of obedience.

Vgotsky explains it as follows -

“What kind of instruction is optimal for a particular child? Without doubt, this question is immediately comprehensible to any committed teacher in virtually any country in the world, and most of them are likely to want concrete answers to the question, not only as a theoretical puzzle, but in relation to their immediate practices. If one were to look to scientific psychology and educational research for advice in relation to this practical problem, what would the answer(s) look like?

This simple question raises several profound problems. Normative and political issues about the goals of instruction and the resources available for realizing these goals must be resolved. A theory of learning is needed that can explain how intellectual capabilities are developed. If instruction is not viewed as an end in itself, then a theory about the relationship between specific subject-matter instruction and its consequences for psychological development is also needed. This last problem was the main tension against which Vygotsky developed his well-known concept of zone of proximal development, where the zone was meant to focus attention on the relation between instruction and development” And to summarise -  “understanding development as a process that is characterized by a unity of material and mental aspects, a unity of the social and the personal during the child’s ascent up the stages of development”

And this method, and those of the great minds above, can be best expressed in ‘hacking education’ which the open source education understand and promote.

Hacking Your Education, Part 1

A talk I gave to a group of University of North Texas students back in September. Keith Brown – Hacking Your Education Part 1 from Anthony Miles on Vimeo. [You can watch Part 2 here]

Hacking Education Begins with Good Habits and Practical Knowledge

I often talk with youth about how what they are doing in high school and/or university may not be giving them everything they need. There are lot of ways, however, that the system can be used to provide opportunities to get the basics that go toward discovering the good life. Of course, this basically means that you have to develop the incredibly great habit of working for your own welfare even…

Homeschooling Ain’t Just for Crazies Anymore

I read an interesting article on Wired this morning about “The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids,” and I have to say, I am super excited about the opportunities that exist within the realm of nontraditional school.

But before I delve into that, let me first say that I am not an anti-public school cheerleader. I am a product of the public school system (of the 1980s and…

Teachers must Care; Students must Attend

That is, mentors must be engaged with mentoring people, seeing the student as an Existenz, with all of the possibility that this entails. And learners must attend, being fully now/here wherever they are, focused on this happening with the mentor. It must be a loving struggle for elucidation of each other, or else it will merely fall back into the dominating structures of expert explication.

…If…

Today was a busy day, like so many others around these parts. My daughter-from-another-mother, who's with us for the holidays, stayed up with me for most of the night, falling asleep in the first light of day as I was still busily tapping away the Planning Blues. Due to the sneaky nap effects of migraine tablets early yesterday, I've been able to keep going for almost 36 hours at current count, with no signs of stopping.

Pirate Cap and I went to town for the weekly shopping, where I picked up the 2014 edition of annual (sublime) diary SoJournal. Now I'm ready to start the new year swingin'.

Meanwhile, the kids had been getting on with their morning routines so that by the time we got back, they were off to the community swimming pool down the street for the day, ever-ready to soak up the urine-infested waters of a nation worth of holiday-goers who have been flooding our  neighbourhood for the past month. Sour grapes here - town was a stark raving madhouse, with no parking spaces, driving skills, or common sense for miles around.

Just as friends of ours from a neighbouring town, eight times removed, turned into our driveaway, I got a call that Sash had been injured (an ever-ongoing saga with his big toe) and could I please go get them.

Craziness ensued at the house as three little boys: two 7yo's and one a wee 3, bonded in the Jacuzzi, shower gel and a bar of soap to boot. The families at large ended off the day by going for a beach run (or just, ehm, rundown, in the case of the men).

After making and polishing a hearty supper of soup, Mr. Neutron and I gave The Odd Life of Timothy Green a pause and went off to his room for our first Hacking Scouts Coven Meeting :)

Now, if ever unschooling has taught me a single lesson, it's that learning - much like living - should be nothing if not fluid and dynamic. As with the 0-100 Game, there's no game, set, match 'sticking to the plan'. You go with the flow or the current gets ya.

I'd worked up to the point of designing a badge for the first three ranks of Scout:

- Dragon

- Unicorn, and

- Wizard

As a Scouting Coven, we talked about our Hacking Scouts sign ✌ , which with its two fingers is, ironically,  very close to that of the BSA's three...: Peace up, man, this world needs some luvvin'!

We learned the now-modified Firefly Promise, which I'll post about soonest, seeing that it can already not be called the Dragon Promise anymore...things keep changing rapidly around here! That served as a gateway for discussing the Wise Ones, that which I know to be the miraculous unseen world of energetic beings and forms that are ours to access. We are quite the spiritual family - because even hippies had to get in line for upgrades ヅ - and though I'm tempted to feel chuffed that Hacking Scouts could blend so easily with our core tenets, it stands to reason that we would bring the unseen into ev and all that we do. Plus, we're the ones doing the actual hacking, damnit!

Our motto I'll write about separately, as that is such an important part of our general daily teachings in the house that it warrants a post in the spotlight. We took the Boy Scouts Honesty Character Connection as is, because I saw that as a great basic brush-up on values such as staying true to one's word, telling the truth, and doing your best. Side note: He're a cute little game to play that touches on sex, lies and videotapes truth and dare honesty versus dishonesty.

We didn't get to Scouts Law (which I'm keeping as is for now and will hack as we go along) or Youth Protection, feeling that I'd done enough preaching points for one night. Have to build up some brownie points in the form of, well why ever not, brownies first o.O

I included a last-minute Hacking Scouts Cosmology, which I'll get up as images files once I land down on the ground again. That turned out to be such a wise decision, because we used that very visual as a guide to planning the remaining ranks of our Hack:

Bobcat = Crystal Scout

Tiger Cub = Growing Green Scout

Wold Cub = Wizard Scout

Bear Cub = Totem Scout

Webelos = Fire Scout

Boy Scout = Earth Scout

Tenderfoot = Water Scout

Second Class = Air Scout

First Class = Dragon Scout

Star = Unicorn Scout

Life = Angel Scout

Eagle Scout = Universe Scout

Now that sounds like something that is simply perfect for our little unit!

Best of all?

It was made by us :-D