*Hackademia: Leveraging the Conflict Between Expertise and Innovation to Create Disruptive Technologies * *** * http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/01/kolko *Beth Kolko, University of Washington* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live This talk describes two projects that tackle the same issue: how and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation I'll present findings from a book-in-progress based on interviews with hackers and makers tentatively titled "Why Rulebreakers Will Rule the World." That book connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches. The presentation will also discuss the results of a two-year experiment I've been running within the university entitled "Hackademia" which is an attempt to infect academic pursuits with a hacker ethos and challenge non-experts to see themselves as potentially significant contributors to innovative technologies. Hackademia is a semi-formal learning group that introduces mostly nontechnical students to basic technical skills and presents them with an open-ended challenge. There have been six iterations of the group so far, and each quarter new students join as we use a participant-observation model to explore how nontechnical adults gain technical skills. Hackademia is driven by a desire to create functional rather than accredited engineers, to position engineering literacy as a skill that's as important to an informed citizenry as science literacy, and to help individuals see themselves as creators rather than consumers. *Links* * A Little Bit Luddite <http://bethkolko.wordpress.com/> * Hackademia <http://uwhackademia.wordpress.com/>