About a month ago, we had the EITC curriculum council meeting that featured a number of serious IT guys from different state institutions and companies as guests – in order to better grasp the ideas and requirements of the enterprise. These guys had respectable titles and good real-life, hands-on experience. And they were definitely not stupid. Yet at the end of the day, we were not much wiser in terms of improving the curriculum. The recommendations had been roughly the following – get rid of the ‘ballast’ like ethics, legal issues, languages, economics and philosophy (even math was mentioned!), teach only the latest and greatest in software and hardware, find everyone a strict specialisation, ask the enterprise which kind of people are needed and act accordingly. The council felt confused at best. Is this higher education…?
Then I read this article – and especially its comments. I have to bow to the commenters – their written thoughts are polite, insightful and informative compared to the ones almost universally found in Estonian online media (earning it the nickname “restroom wall”). I spent nearly the whole Saturday just reading comments and thinking. But the uncomfortable tendencies described there by Americans sound equally alarming on these shores here. The ideas of educating the elect elite and leaving the majority to the level of useful farm animals are just becoming too visible to keep ignoring them.
Finally, I have worked with my students of three online courses for a better part of the autumn term by now. In general, they have been a nice company with decent knowledge and thinking ability. Yet there have been occasional surfacing of another mindset too – the one which, while not inherently bad, would start braking their future in the long run.
So to sum up the ideas from the three sources, I sat and wrote down some thoughts. Credits for inspiration (especially for the Hacker) go to Steven Levy’s famous Hackers, the writings of ESR and to the Hacker Ethic as outlined by Pekka Himanen.
Note about the ITN acronym: it is based on a pejorative term widely used (strictly informally!) in Estonian IT circles, meaning someone whose IT-related work largely falls into the McJob category as described by Douglas Coupland. The last letter refers to a term which is largely taboo in today’s English-speaking world.
So, here we go…
When another Pointy-Haired Boss orders a task to be completed,
ITN asks: “By when?”
Hacker hasks: “What for?”
In education,
ITN wants skills needed today
Hacker wants knowledge and wisdom
From a job,
ITN wants a paycheck
Hacker wants creative freedom (the paycheck will follow naturally)
At work,
ITN has superiors and inferiors
Hacker has colleagues
Dealing with non-IT people,
ITN sees dumbusers
Hacker sees potential collaborators
Teaching others,
ITN wants to create exact copies of him/herself
Hacker promotes using one’s own brain
About E-learning,
ITN thinks WebCT/Blackboard
Hacker thinks the Net
About free/open-source software,
ITN does not get the point of giving things away
Hacker understands the Linus’ Law in both of its versions
Talking about virtual worlds,
ITN sees a game
Hacker sees a service platform
Hearing the phrase “intellectual property”
ITN asks “how much do I owe?”
Hacker asks “how long can this nonsense go on?”
About licenses,
ITN is ignorant, happily so
Hacker has read the Windows EULA, is familiar with CC and knows the difference of GPL and BSD
Among animals,
ITN would be a dog
Hacker would be a cat
As mindset,
ITN has dutiful dullness
Hacker has playful cleverness
Footnote: I definitely consider simpler IT-related jobs necessary and respectable (although the question is whether they need university-level training). However, the two mindsets described above can be found in all walks of professional life (and not in IT only) – one can have a creative, hacker mindset in a managerial position or as a simple helpdesk, or be an ITN as a Lead Developer. The main question is: which one is promoted by education?
