Student and Teacher (from The Hacker Ethic)

The Hacker Learning Model
from The Hacker Ethic (Pekka Himanen, 2001)

A typical hacker's learning process starts out with setting up an interesting problem, working toward a solution using various resources, and submitting that solution to extensive testing.

When a hacker checks out information sources on the Net, he often adds helpful information from his own experience. An ongoing, critical, evolutionary discussion forms around various problems.

The hackers' open learning model can be called their “Net Academy.” It is a continuously evolving learning environment created by the learners themselves.

In the hacker world, teachers are often those who have just learned something themselves. Often someone just engaged in a study of a subject is better able to teach it to others than the expert who no longer comes to it fresh and may have lost his grasp of how novices think. Nor does the expert find the teaching of basics very satisfying, while a student/teacher may find doing such teaching more rewarding.

If one is really able to teaching something to others, one must have already made the material very clear to oneself.

The wider significance of the hacker learning model is its reminder to us of the potential of seeing the academic development and learning models as identical.

We could use this idea to create a generalized Net Academy, in which study materials would be free for use, critique, and development by everyone. By improving existing material in new directions, the network could continuously produce better resources.

A hacker-style reading of the research material with a view toward criticizing and improving it – toward motivating oneself with it – would be much more conducive to learning than the tendency to just read material.

The Net Academy would follow the hacker model in creating a continuum from beginning student to foremost researcher in the field. Students would learn by becoming researching learners from the beginning.

In the Net Academy, every learning event would enrich all other learners. Alone or in company of others, the learner would add something to the shared material. This differs from our present model of disposable learning.

When material is constantly being adapted and expanded, competing versions are born. This is always the case in the hacker and research fields. Hackers have solved the practical problems arising from this by developing “concurrent-versioning” systems, which enable users to see how competing versions differ from the existing version and from each other.

The core of the academy does not consist of its individual achievements but of the academic model itself.

(from The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen, 2001)

Yogananda on Mind and Matter

The Western day is nearing when the inner science of self-control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of Nature. The Atomic Age will see men's minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction. An indirect benefit of mankind's concern over atomic bombs may be an increased practical interest in the science of yoga.

-- Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi  (p 265)

To be a student

(We begin the year, as is our tradition, with a discussion of how to be a student of the path.)

The difficulty on the path is what comes from ourselves. People do not like to be pupils, they like to be teachers. If they only knew that the greatness and perfection of the great ones, who have come to this world, was in their pupilship and not in teaching! The greater the teacher, the better pupil he was. Such a teacher learned from everyone.

No idea can be called one's own. All ideas have been learned from one source or another, but in time one comes to think they are one's own, yet all the time they keep one's cup covered up from further knowledge. The first thing to be learned is to understand how to uncover one's cup, that is, how to become a pupil. What are one's (preconceived) ideas? They are just collected knowledge. This should be unlearned.

-- Hazrat Inayat Khan