And, magically, this item appears today (Thursday 15 September, digitalculture.org or hackingtheacademy.org) about a book 'crowdsourced in one week'. What a brave and wonderful idea - to 'reform' the academy using digital technology and social media. The book will appear in conventional print format as Hacking the Academy, produced by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt and published by MPublishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library. I am reading the edited volume in its open access format and there is also a longer web version. What is so splendid about this is its versatility, its openness (obviously), the way in which the book was compiled (using the best contributions from a total of 329 submissions from 177 authors) and the tight time-frame for submissions (seven days) which meant that contributions were focused and engaged.
Harking back to my previous post, here is evidence that authors (177 of them at least) are keen to share ideas through open source media and who may be part of the brave new world of open publishing.
To give you a taste of the book, here is an excerpt from a section called The Meaning of "Hack" by Tad Suiter:
Originally, the term was used to describe computer code. There were two opposing meanings to calling a piece of code a “hack.” One, it is expertly written, efficient, and does precisely what it is intended to do, with eloquence. The other was that the code was hastily written, sloppy, and essentially only just good enough. It was a workaround, the software equivalent of a hardware kludge.
As mutually exclusive as these two connotations of the term may seem, however, both the polished, impressive hack and the quick-and-dirty hack have a fundamental similarity. They are both born of a certain relationship to a certain type of knowledge.
Hackers are autodidacts. From the earliest hackers working at large research universities on the first networks to anyone who deserves the term today, a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing. They teach themselves and one another because they are at the bleeding edge of knowledge about that system.
Suiter goes on to encourage a sense of play amongst academics:
[Play is]... something that “serious” academics don’t get to explore as often as they should. Play is good for the soul—it reinvigorates, brings joy, renews commitments. It makes things fun. And it is also good for the intellect. Play leads to types of problem-solving and synthesis that would otherwise be impossible. There’s a reason that “clever” means both funny and smart.
If hacking is play with a purpose, I am all for it.
#change11
Harking back to my previous post, here is evidence that authors (177 of them at least) are keen to share ideas through open source media and who may be part of the brave new world of open publishing.
To give you a taste of the book, here is an excerpt from a section called The Meaning of "Hack" by Tad Suiter:
Originally, the term was used to describe computer code. There were two opposing meanings to calling a piece of code a “hack.” One, it is expertly written, efficient, and does precisely what it is intended to do, with eloquence. The other was that the code was hastily written, sloppy, and essentially only just good enough. It was a workaround, the software equivalent of a hardware kludge.
As mutually exclusive as these two connotations of the term may seem, however, both the polished, impressive hack and the quick-and-dirty hack have a fundamental similarity. They are both born of a certain relationship to a certain type of knowledge.
Hackers are autodidacts. From the earliest hackers working at large research universities on the first networks to anyone who deserves the term today, a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing. They teach themselves and one another because they are at the bleeding edge of knowledge about that system.
Suiter goes on to encourage a sense of play amongst academics:
[Play is]... something that “serious” academics don’t get to explore as often as they should. Play is good for the soul—it reinvigorates, brings joy, renews commitments. It makes things fun. And it is also good for the intellect. Play leads to types of problem-solving and synthesis that would otherwise be impossible. There’s a reason that “clever” means both funny and smart.
If hacking is play with a purpose, I am all for it.
#change11
No comments:
Post a Comment