Productively Lost

L. Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:21:37 GMT

Yesterday Hacker School's resident Mel Chua shared her work on educational psychology theory for Hacker School 1. I had seen an earlier iteration of this talk from PyCon video archives, and it was useful to me then. However, this time I had more relevant experience with which to understand it. Hacker School is the first time I have had such a fluid and indeterminate educational experience. Even graduate school was more structured, and with more fixed goals.

I have previously compared Hacker School to a game of Tetris, in which new exciting things are constantly dropping from the sky, and you can't get them all and fit them all into your life. Eventually you will lose, but it is fun to try, anyway. I like this analogy, but in some ways it is too passive. Hacker School (and life in general, if you let it) is more like a giant maze with more and more doors appearing all the time. Many paths connect to each other, and you may find yourself back where you were before, but from a new perspective. Here I can see more clearly than ever before the unboundedness of the space of learning, and this makes the idea of a best path through it almost laughable. That's not to say that there are no poor ways to learn. Only that that are many good ways.

One central message from Mel's talk was the idea of being Productively Lost. Given that you are your own guide in an infinite maze makes being lost natural. The question is how to make the best of your learning given that situation.

Mel talked about using measurement to guide learning, in analogy with Test-Driven-Design. She talked about how to most effectively join an open source project so that you can maximise your interactions and contributions for everyone's benefit, and for your own development. There was also a section on motivation, self-efficacy, and attitudes.

She mentioned different learning styles, and followed up later in the day with a workshop on the topic. I found this enormously helpful, because instead of just coming out with a label, which I have done in the past with this kind of theory, I was able to see strategies that make better use of my strengths. By reviewing my experiences at Hacker School so far, and relating them to these axes, I feel I am in a better position to enhance my learning experiences deliberately.

Mel also talked about the progression of learning. Learning tends to follow a cyclical pattern of periods of assimilation of new ideas into an existing mental model followed by a paradigm shift that requires accommodation. Accommodation is needed when new ideas are fitting less well into the existing model, and an extensive refactorisation makes everything fit more naturally. This stage is slow and uncomfortable, and may even feel like a regression. After this, there is a shorter period during which learning new things with the new model is fast and rewarding, before reaching another steadier state of assimilation.

Even though I have taken my own way on some critical aspects of my life, much of my life is characterisable by following paths that were set by someone else, or were simply unexamined pursuit of "the way things are done". Applying to Hacker School in the first place was a big, intimidating step away from this pattern that stretched my courage. It rivals the most rewarding decisions of my life so far. The increased autonomy and competence I am developing here feels like a new freedom, a tipping point into a feedback loop of self-expression and creative action that goes way beyond any particular programming concept I have learned while here.

Becoming comfortable with this fundamental lostness, and yet feeling adequate to navigate it, is ultimately much more empowering than the security of excelling at following well-lit, paths sanctioned and rewarded by others.

1: Slides from last year's version here: http://blog.melchua.com/2013/10/07/edupsych-for-hacker-schoolers-v-1-1-presentation-slides/

Transparent Learning

L. Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 21:32:00 GMT

I have applied to Hacker School for the Summer 2014 batch. I'm immensely excited about it for various reasons, but the one I wanted to mention here now is the attitude toward learning that Hacker School promotes.

One of the few Rules of Conduct at Hacker School is not to feign surprise when someone doesn't know something.

[No feigning surprise] means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand."

The other side of the coin of not feigning surprise is being transparent about your own learning.

When I meet smart people I admire, I am usually eager to show them that I am like them. So I look for opportunities to demonstrate that we share ideas and values. In a programming community, this could translate into finding a reason to bring up topics such as stacks or RMS. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is normal and healthy to establish common ground. It feels good.

The problem comes when you want to interact with someone as you continue to learn. If you can't comfortably say “I don't know what a stack is.”, then you deny yourself and your peers the opportunity to collaboratively change that. More importantly, your silence reinforces the idea that it is not okay to not know or not understand. It is more subtle than feigning surprise, but not necessarily less powerful.

In the process of applying to Hacker School, I've looked at the blogs of some of the facilitators. In her blog, Allison Kaptur takes this concept of transparency a step further. For example, in a post in which she teaches about the Python interpreter, Allison writes (emphasis mine):

There are four steps that python takes when you hit return: lexing, parsing, compiling, and interpreting. Lexing is breaking the line of code you just typed into tokens. The parser takes those tokens and generates a structure that shows their relationship to each other (in this case, an Abstract Syntax Tree). The compiler then takes the AST and turns it into one (or more) code objects. Finally, the interpreter takes each code object executes the code it represents.
I’m not going to talk about lexing, parsing, or compiling at all today, mainly because I don’t know anything about these steps yet. Instead, we’ll suppose that all that went just fine, and we’ll have a proper python code object for the interpreter to interpret.

To me, this feels like radical activism. Even if I don't get in to Hacker School, I want to learn this skill of portraying myself authentically, even if it exposes some vulnerability. Fundamentally, it's about separating self-worth from knowledge, and getting over Imposter Syndrome.

As a step in this direction, I am posting the fact that I have applied to Hacker School, even though I may not be admitted. If that happens, I will be very disappointed, and it will be embarrassing for that to be public, but I want to say that it's okay to fail at things, and it's okay to make mistakes.

subsymbol.org (Posts about vulnerability)

Productively Lost

Transparent Learning