Whew.
I say we take a break. I'm going to take a step back with this post and take a look at something a little more everyday– like say, education.
Do you remember your high school classes? Not the angst of having bad acne and the angst of asking your first person out on a date, but your actual high school classes? Think about them. What were they like in general?
Yeah, kinda boring huh? I mean, some stuff was fun, but there was always a lot more that was just mind-numbingly abstract and seemed to have no connection at all to the life of the average teenager. Even with the good teachers, it's simply hard for kids to relate to some subjects, especially when they can't see a practical point.
But what about when you stick say, a 3D printer in the hands of a competent math teacher and his class? The teacher enters in some code, the machine whizzes away and builds a three dimensional representation of what he's trying to teach. All of a sudden, that stupid disc and washer integration thing isn't quite so impossible to understand; that 3D function actually makes sense.
And that's just the beginning. 3D printing could have a fantastic effect on shop, carpentry, product design, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, even the humanities with some creativity. Imagine if your physics teacher could reproduce every newtonian physics experiment simply by pumping some design code into a printer and putting the parts together? Imagine if your biology teacher could print out lab-on-a-chips and tissue models for regular class use? Or if your classical history teacher could print out the precise 3D layout of the Roman Forum? Class might actually be interesting!
Even better, imagine a combined computer science and shop class in which the teacher guided his students in making and programming a RepRap with its Arduino microcontroller. Not only would the students learn a lot about basic robotics, engineering, and programming, but the class and the school would then have a very cool piece of machinery with which to experiment further.
Somewhat similar in concept is the "Self-organizing computer course" developed by Shimon Schocken of Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel. At Efi Arazi, Schocken teaches a class in which he . helps his students build an entire computer completely from scratch. Even better, Schocken has completely open sourced all of the lecture talks, software, and other necessary programs, making it possible for anyone with internet access to take the course or parts as they choose. With such a familiarity with every abstraction level of a computer, his students are well-equipped to deal with practically any level of computer science. As open source advocate and TED fellow Catarina Mota states:
But to me, the major benefit [of Open Source Hardware] is education. More and more, devices are becoming black boxes. People used to understand computers and think of them as tools because they understood how they worked, and now we don’t. Whether we like it or not, technology shapes the way we think, the way we communicate, the way we act, the way we learn. So if we buy a computer or phone and we can’t modify or even understand how they work, our thoughts and actions are dictated by this interface design that we have nothing to do with. We need to understand the objects we use because if we can’t shape them, they will shape us. There are already so many things in our lives that we’ve changed to adapt to the technology we have available.
Thus, if we seize ahold of open source hardware education opportunities, we can both reverse this trend in computer science unfamiliarity, and improve all of the courses we already have. In a time of school budget cuts and the decline of existing programs, perhaps we can come up with a cost effective way of using open source hardware to help arrest the free fall and prepare students for the tech-dominated world.
Simon Schocken's 2012 TED Talk on the Self-Organizing Computer Course
It's useful to keep in mind the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions. It seems like Mota is saying that open source is a necessary condition -- that if hardware is closed source, it is a black box that people can't understand, so they can't learn from it. It is probably not a sufficient condition. Open source code bases can be horribly documented and hard to comprehend, much less to learn from.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the connection between the 3D printing bit at the start and the open hardware / open education bit at the end?
It was just another concept in open source education that I found. I probably should have made the distinction a little more clear.
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