Hacking is Playful

Also central to the Hacker Ethic is playfulness. At a 2006 O�Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny wrote, �Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations� (O�Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, website). Despite early, highly structured approaches to computing in mainframe laboratories in the mid-twentieth century, a computing culture of iterative experimental hacking has evolved that is essentially playful. Hacking as play emerged in response to the Cold War environment where the first �hacks� were parasitic on established systems and at the same time working against the system. Richard Stallman writes about hacking as �playfulness, cleverness, and exploration.� He writes, �Hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible in a spirit of playful cleverness.� Activities that display playful cleverness have �hack value.� Essentially, �Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking� (Stallman, �On Hacking.�)

Notes:

Folksonomies: education hacking

Taxonomies:
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/technology and computing/hardware/computer (0.438301)
/technology and computing/computer crime (0.232786)

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Entities:
Richard Stallman:Person (0.928052 (negative:-0.287574)), Ben Cerveny:Person (0.644072 (positive:0.430780)), Matt Webb:Person (0.614022 (positive:0.430780)), Cold War:FieldTerminology (0.566328 (negative:-0.250833))

Hacker Ethics and Higher Learning: The Moral Clash Determining the Future of American Higher Education

Periodicals>Journal Article: Marti, Gerardo (2011), Hacker Ethics and Higher Learning: The Moral Clash Determining the Future of American Higher Education, The Cresset, Easter 2011 (Vol LXXIV, No. 4 pp 17-27), Retrieved on 2016-04-26

Source Material [thecresset.org]

Folksonomies: education hacking