* Article: Winn, Joss (2014) The university as a hackerspace. In: Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance, 08-09 May 2014, Nottingham.
From the Abstract:
“In a paper published last year, I argued for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture. (Winn 2013) In doing so, I outlined an account of ‘the university’ as an institution that provided the material and subsequent intellectual conditions that early hackers were drawn to and in which they worked.
The key point I tried to make was that hacking was originally a form of academic labour that emerged out of the intensification and valorisation of scientific research within the institutional context of the university. The reproduction of hacking as a form of academic labour took place over many decades as academics and their institutions shifted from an ideal of unproductive, communal science to a more productive, entrepreneurial approach to the production of knowledge. As such, I view hacking as a peculiar, historically situated form of labour that arose out of friction in the academy: vocation vs. profession; teaching vs. research; basic vs. applied research; research vs. development; private vs. public; war vs. peace; institutional autonomy vs. state dependence; scientific communalism vs. intellectual property; individualism vs. co-operation.
A question I have for you today is whether hacking in the university is still a possibility? Can a university contain (i.e. intellectually, politically, practically) a hackerspace? Can a university be a hackerspace? If so, what does it look like? How would it work? I am trying to work through these questions at the moment with colleagues at the University of Lincoln. The name I have given to this emerging project is ‘The university as a hackerspace’ and it has grown out of an existing pedagogical and political project called ‘Student as Producer.’ It is also one of four agreed areas of work in a new ‘digital education’ strategy at Lincoln.
More broadly, our project asks “how do we reproduce the university as a critical, social project?”
From the moment I first learned about hackerspaces and makerspaces I thought it made perfect sense to combine them with educational models. What better way to learn than to build and modify tools that have real-world applicability and solve our society’s problems? I think this is something that could be applied to all age groups, child through adult, and I think it is a method of learning that is innate to us from a very young age. A while back, I saw a video (can’t find it now, sorry) where a professor at Stanford’s D-School said he felt he was teaching rudimentary skills to graduate students because our current educational system systematically removes the collaborate maker mentality.
What you have proposed in this article is, essentially, my life dream.