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)