Brick in the Wall vs Hole in the Wall: Rethinking Education for Hackers

all right we're going to get started car yeah doesn't work okay this is Caroline Harden and she's going to be speaking about brick in the hole Brick in the Wall versus hole in the wall right so I'm going to talk today about the tension between problems hackers have with traditional formal education brick in the wall and the issues with face with just trying to learn everything on the internet hole in the wall I'm also going to look at some alternative cool and cool Alternative Learning environments like hacker spaces why hackers are modeling Cutting Edge learning and what we need to disrupt the future of Education I'm sorry the mic is broke so if you're in the back you can't

hear me just let me know I'll try and speak loud anyway we know that learning and school are not the same thing

so why should you listen to me talk about education hacking education and educating for hackers in short I am a self-taught programmer who has a computer science degree I taught CS for five years both at a for-profit career college and at a nonprofit hacker space that's a picture of me teaching in Ghana with reboot the kitten I've been a program um I've been an uh had opportunities to to teach in a variety of situations but like many of you I hated High School I failed classes and I've learned more from Wikipedia than some of my teachers the last two years I've spent working on my masters in educational technology studying how to create a better way of learning

computer literacy and computer science so six shocking things I learned in grad school but why schools suck all right there's more than six but these are the things which really surprise Ed me I didn't know until I started studying the issue and which I think we really need to pay attention to if we're going to disrupt the system first of all what are we even trying to do with school there's absolutely no consensus on this although it's been vigorously debated for over 2500 years all the way back to confucious and Plato uh some of the things people say schools are for are to help make you a better citizen uh teach you what you need to know to get a job learn how to

think emotional self-actualization moral development or social and cultural development when nobody can agree on what success looks like everything looks like failure so how many of you feel that school was trying to crush your individuality and force you to conform guess what you're right it was because it's that cultural angle that ends up having the biggest impact another quote from that same source is since education is always against some things and for others it Bears the burden of our cultural obsessions we spend more time as a society debating whether to teach Evolution than how to teach Evolution because if we don't have some Conformity and basic rules of culture we don't function as a society anymore we'd

be like noisebridge and because of that culture imperative education is shaped mostly by policy and politics not science and research school boards aren't run by the people who are expert in educational theories they're run by politicians and we all know how smart and trustworthy they are now we say that education is the great equalizer this is true but our schools are not designed to give equal education to everyone system doesn't create a Level Playing Field so much as reinforcing social economic status which fundamentally shapes how you interact with not only the school but bureaucracy and Authority in general if we're going to disrupt schools we need to not make this same mistake and anytime you try to

standardize something as individual as education you've made some pretty big decisions about some individuals being better than others consider that some of the main people who originally conceived and promoted standardized tests like Carl Brigham of a little test you might know as the SAT he was originally trying to prove the racial superiority of certain white people by creating a test that was heavily culturally biased even recently they did a study which showed that and I quote white students have a edge not on education or study skills or aptitude but because they're most likely growing up around white people are classrooms look and act very outdated that is a picture from 1907 and it looks pretty much like the

way the classrooms look today what's really weird though is that even though the classrooms function much the same as they had for over a 100 years teachers actually are trained in Cutting Edge theories so why don't we see it in the classrooms because the system is stronger than the individuals that come out of teacher training college and they're just ground down and assimilated so some of you have had opportunities to teach I hope many of you will consider doing the future how many of you would try to use good educational techniques like using different learning styles the auditory visual kinesthetic would some of you guys try to do that guess what that's not a real thing it's total

the science isn't support it at all there are no learning styles but nobody knows that because people aren't properly trained our epistemological and pedagogical theor have actually moved Way Beyond that but no one has a chance to apply it and remember that cultural angle of schools it doesn't matter what the teacher knows if the general public isn't on the same page a teacher whose classroom is too different just gets destroyed in parent teacher conferences we can't fix schools as long as teachers aren't able to even apply the best we know of learning Sciences as far as bad teachers look nobody goes into Tech Support to become bitter or jaded no one goes into Securities they can and

have an excuse all to drink all day most of you probably didn't go into security so you could drink all day but when you're just trying to do your job and help someone and no one is listening and all they do is undermine you while whining and screwing everything up worse in the keynote today Adam showstack said if you feel really ineffectual at your job you just get burned out how many of you have had terrible teachers who you still hate I Do Bad Teachers they hurt us and we have not forgiven them and so when we finally get in a position to do something about it we cut their pay we publicly denigrate them we destroy their benefits and fire

as many as them as we can so they can't hurt us or anyone else again and you're not going to hear that hear this but that's making everything worse attacking the working condition of all teachers to get revenge on individual teachers diverts energy from fixing the problem and drives good people away from the field which leaves the schools desperate to hire and keep whomever they can when I worked at the for-profit tech school I helped with hiring decisions and I couldn't hire good teachers because the reputation for the working conditions was so bad I could hardly hire a warm body but I was told I had to hire anyway no matter how bad they were

all my colleagues and I all of them were just trying to figure out a way to afford to quit and I have been that teacher who has had student fail as a direct result of me not having training time or resources for them to succeed and it was the worst feeling in the world so many teachers are put in this impossible situation that 46% of them 46% will quit within the first 5 years the risk the rest risk becoming deeply corroded people that's where the Bad Teachers come from any conspiracy to ruin public education would make blaming teachers a key strategy I'm not saying don't be angry at the teachers but if you want anything to change direct that

anger where it belongs at the system that created and tolerated them so those are the things I learned about what's broken in education that really needs to be addressed for any disruption to make a serious impact so if schools are still broken can we just get rid of them for those of you who have not seen the Ted Talk by sugata Mitra he put a computer in a hole in the wall in the slums in India and when he came back the discovered that the kids had learned a bunch of stuff like magic so we don't need schools right we'll just give every kid a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection the talk seems so hopeful and

inspiring in and I hate to dump on anything seeming hopeful and inspiring or the idea of giving kids computers and internet access but if we don't face the reality of why this and similar disruptions don't actually pan out the system wins first of all it's not a new idea a famous and influential educational research named Seymour paper wrote a book called Mind storms in which he said kids learn a lot when they play with local computer programming does anyone know what year Mindstorms was written anyone want to make a guess 1980 right over 30 years ago like me Ted Talk seamour pepper got a lot of press and a lot of people were really excited about teaching with logo

programming after all his research said that under the right conditions it could lead to all sorts of amazing deep independently fulfilling Creative Learning you know the stuff you don't get in schools the media hyp became computers equal learning and the public was said that sounds pretty good we're going to talk in a couple minutes about what happened to logo this is what's already happened to the hole in thewall project to prevent vandalism hole in the wall has to put the kiosks on the school grounds they have to lean on that infrastructure so that they're supervised this is one that got vandalized anyway and is now literally just a hole in the wall as far as how much learning happened even Hall

had to admit and I quote the students would tend to Plateau out when the kids did achieve learning it was very timec consuming compared to guided instruction and the kids were just giving up because they got frustrated by dead ends so Hol noall had to hire local mediators to sit next to the computers and encourage the kids oh how interesting great job now I don't know about you but I don't think it really solved the problem to replace a mean teacher who nevertheless knows how to teach with a really nice person who just panders to yourself esteem a good teacher a good one makes a huge difference in learning but it's more than just being nice and more than

knowing the content you need to know how to teach the content so many of you had professors in college who were famous researchers but we really shitty teachers that's pedagogical content knowledge College it's a problem with colleges that not enough teachers have them and a problem with disrupting the system that not enough people have it outside of the schools but training teachers is expensive so of course the government would like to avoid that cost but just giving laptops to kids and saying here you go if you don't learn it's your own fault you must be lazy there's a reason the rich families pay for private tutors and it's not okay to abandon responsibility onto poor kids without

providing them any kind of support and learning Sciences knows after 50 years of research that Hands-On Learning Without a mentor or a teacher or any kind of guidance is generally slow and leads to Swiss cheese knowledge has lots of holes and blind spots instead because we know how the human brain works we should be using that science to structure lessons that are super effective if you're willing to spend years of trial and error like many of us did you get pretty good as independently learning by doing but even so it's always faster and more effective with a mentor letting people flounder is easier but doesn't work very well what about apprenticeships one- i- one apprenticeships really are awesome but

there are problems with scale there's always more novices than experts Germany has a successful apprenticeship program which uses professionally trained teachers for covering the fun fundamentals you can imagine how inefficient it would be to teach kindergarteners the Alphabet by apprenticing them with professional authors and again we get back to pedagogical content knowledge just because you're good at a skill doesn't mean you're going to be very good at teaching it what about muks muks hit the big time in 2012 with Stanford classes on artificial intelligence and they've been scaring educational administrators ever since they get good teachers who know how to teach to record their lectures and put them online for free for everyone everywhere anytime how many of

you have taken a moo how many of you have finished a moo a lot less right it's about 3 to s% actually complete and most of those who do complete already have some college or a degree the hype is that muks will educate those who've never been to college but the data shows and we actually have a lot of data that those who succeed are the already successful at least 80% sometimes upwards of 90% who complete classes already have at least a twoyear degree not only that but they cost upward of $40,000 a class to produce it's a model with promise but we need to do some more work on it all right so I hope I've made a good

case for keeping good teaching in some form but do we need the Ivory Tower Naval gazing self-aggrandizing academic I'm going to finish a story of what happened to seamour papert's Mindstorm and Logo programming so the schools bought the computers but like the Borg they assimilated them in the most conformist way possible by isolating them in a sterile lifeless computer lab and letting students spend one hour a week typing out in lockstep some pre-formatted programs follow-up research was done and showed that the kids weren't learning creativity they weren't getting better at standardized tests which is what they really cared about so the media translated This research as computers don't work and Logo was largely abandoned since they

still had the computers they gave us all typing classes so too long didn't read good ideas poorly implemented get subsumed by the system and then when it doesn't change anything it exhausts The public's interest for decades we lost Decades of computer program being taught in school because people didn't pay attention to the academic research and the science and ignored the culture of our educational system if you fast forward the idea of teaching computer programming in schools is still an nonstarter so all we get is some After School logo mind stor LEGO Mindstorms and scratch and as a point of Interest the one laptop per child project was a direct descendant of all this and that

was the academic researchers trying once again to deliver deliberately disrupt the traditional structure of school once again the traditionally trained teachers and the public didn't really get it and just considered a novelty so if education is based on outdated theories for political reasons implemented by bitter and angry teachers for disorganized and unjust purposes why would you ever voluntarily subject yourself to school why do hackers take classes there is a legitimate debate among hackers and the value of formal traditional education for learning programming networking it skills the classes do offload some things they do help out in some ways they've already found and organized the best learning resources complete with expert Arata they give you a mandatory structure to

lean on with built-in deadlines and money and official transcripts on the line that frees up all your mental resources to just learning the content rather than trying to get yourself to actually sit down and stop playing Mass Effect not only that schools still give you a piece of paper which opens doors and keeps your resume out of the round file helps us meet potential employers future co-workers and more people we can call at 2 a.m. when the server crashes and finally jumping through those Hoops shows a willingness to comply with authority and procedures which many employers like to see what about hacker spaces of all the disruptions which have huge caveats hacker spaces are the most promising

I've heard a lot of people being skeptical about them especially in the in the academic institutions so I'm going to give you four big words and phrases you can throw down the next time someone tries to say that real learning isn't happening there and that you should be in school instead so hacker spaces are good at learning because they're communities of practice which offer situated learning through legitimate peripheral participation with an emphasis on cognitive apprenticeship so you can pretty much lay that sentence down at the Thanksgiving table and shut everyone up this is what it means I'm going to explain it like you're five okay learning is better within groups of friends who work together and you need

to be able to actually practice your skills in real situations for real clients obvious right learning goes better when you're allowed to First hang out and lurk you're invited to mess around when you can make a contribution it's respected and valued and there's experts with you you can geek out that's a really big idea and you learn to think like an expert by talking to experts all these are really powerful ideas with a lot of research behind them so I encourage you to check out the Wikipedia pages so if traditional formal education is broken but just closing the schools and giving it everyone a Chromebook doesn't save us either hacker spaces are really promising because they have

hackers this is why I believe hackers have the personality qualities which are directly applicable to us being cuttingedge Learners and make us the most likely to invent the future of Education we have lots of historical examples of people who have succeeded by getting what they needed from formal education and had the courage to go their own way when they're ready and they've all remained lifelong Learners all these people dropped out of college but were successful in the fields we question authority this is independent critical thinking soccer te and Plato's dialogue Mino says knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning the only way we're going to reinvent the whole system is to question its fundamental

assumptions we read the manual this is augmented learning it allows us to use the manual as an external brain which we can draw upon when we need it rather than wasting time memorizing just in case we use the manual just in time we make things this constructionism Aristotle in the nicoman ethics writes anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it we apply our knowledge and we break things this is learning through failure many of you remember as a kid breaking the computer and having to fix it before your parents got home you learned something when you did that didn't you failure is an incredibly productive way to learn schools don't allow us that

luxury they make everything part of our permanent record encouraging you to follow safe well-trodden narrow paths we'd rather take risks and explore and that's really important to Innovation and Discovery and we're really stubborn this is called grit it's incredibly important and overcoming challenges and persisting through difficult problems we know we can figure it out internal locus of control we believe that we control what the computer does and that we have root privileges in our own lives I always get frustrated when I hear people say oh the computer did this to me no we're the people who say we did this to the computer we also believe that we are capable of learning new skills this is called growth mindset both our

important personality characteristics for being active and not passive in the face of learning we play video games so when you're choosing your SCA Squad you know you have to balance the biotic the tech the combat based on the scenario you're going into this is called systems thinking very important very powerful not taught well in schools besides being an awesome way to learn games are also proven to increase your literacy we use the hive mind whether with IRC GitHub Reddit crowdsourcing it's collaboration schools try to say sharing is cheating hacking taught us that it's the best way to get things done and we make tools to do things for us batch files scripts robots we call it

being lazy learning Sciences calls it distributed cognition all these amplify our power to get things done these will save us from the boring things so we can concentrate on the more interesting problems so despite what schools did to us hackers are really amazing Learners so for the right people how do we do it we free the content We join forces and we hacknowledge transmission this time with science we already believe in the mission we believe that information sharing is a powerful positive good and it's our ethical duty to show our share our expertise first of all we need to create more open educational resources because knowledge doesn't belong to the ACM or peeron publishing it deserves to be free

it used to be the only way to get content was through the schools if we can free the content we force schools to bring more to the game or get out of the game contribute to Wikipedia if knowledge is socially constructed that I'd like us to be the ones constructing it participate constructively in forums don't troll the newbies we want them on our side we don't want them retreating to schools and create use more open source software license your work under Creative Commons release it under GitHub Source Forge create instructible YouTube tutorials and so on make the knowledge you know free as in Freedom We join forces seriously space Ro I talked to us this morning where he

said join forces we should be doing this join your local hacker space join your local Linux User Group 2600 Meetup Defcon Meetup amateur radio club if you don't have one of these create one next time someone says they want to learn programming offer to answer their questions Mentor them and if you know someone you want to learn something from ask them and teach remember how much High School sucked for you be a ray of Hope for some young hacker by volunteering with that after school programming your Legos robotics club and offer classes at your hacker space and don't feel like you need to mimic teaching the way it was done in school because if we don't create new learning

environments that actually work for us nobody else is going to and heck there's a lot of online places these are online places you can teach programming the bottom four will pay you for your time there's a great hunger for this then we need to hacknowledge transmission once once we've freed the content and joined forces we need to bring learning into the Sci-Fi Age first learn about Cutting Edge learning Sciences it's super interesting and whenever you want to learn something it'll pay huge dividends learning Sciences actually grew out of computer science the whole computer as a brain metaphor and artificial intelligence it came from us we need to reclaim it outdated teachers also pretend to know

everything don't do that if you teach model expt expert learning show how you figure things out by asking questions because in it it's not about knowing everything it's about knowing how to figure everything out invite your students to contribute and participate and learn from them students are so used to teachers posing as omnipotent experts you may need to actually explain what you're doing to them augmented reality we have Google Glass and augmented reality we should be embracing that for transl ations to constellations or bird songs everything available through your phone or other device that shakes up the whole idea of what knowing means if this is a boundary we need to push to reach a William

Gibson future and invent something new what license agreement all the cool newed Tech we've been inventing KH Academy code combat open badges code Avengers hour of code OPC even whole in the worldall it all comes from hackers and computer scientists if you have an idea throw it out there and if you want it to be robust and effective use learning Sciences so free knowledge join forces and use science to reinvent knowledge despite all its problem traditional formal education hasn't had to change because it hasn't had anything to seriously compete with but hackers are really good at inventing new ways to collaboratively learn so if knowledge is power let's reclaim and reinvent it thank you [Applause]