Slides presented to staff at the University of Lincoln, 19th March 2014.

1. ‘The university as a hackerspace’
Joss Winn, Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln
jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk
http://cerd.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk

2. How do we re-produce the
university as a critical,
social project?

3. http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk
StudentasProducerishackingtheuniversity

4. “Student as Producer restates the meaning
and purpose of higher education by
reconnecting the core activities of
universities, i.e., research and teaching, in a
way that consolidates and substantiates the
values of academic life... Student as
Producer emphasises the role of the student
as collaborators in the production of
knowledge. The capacity for Student as
Producer is grounded in the human
attributes of creativity and desire, so that
students can recognise themselves in a
world of their own design.” (Neary, 2010)

5. LNCD is (was) Not a
Central Development
group!
http://lncd.lincoln.ac.uk/
project/institutional-openness-
case-study
DevXS
hackathon
(2011)
http://devxs.org.uk

6. Digital Education
1. A cross-university digital education group (a committee, working group, network?)
2. Incentives and recognition (teacher education leading to credit and funding)
3. An anti-disciplinary Masters research programme (the ‘university as a hackerspace’)
4. A framework for re-engineering space and time (the ‘idea of the university’:
open, flipped, virtual, edgeless, etc.)
http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/03/03/digital-education/

7. ‘The university as a hackerspace’
• Cross-university Masters by Research degree
• The ‘campus’ = the ‘hackerspace’ (virtual/
material/open/edgeless)
• Anti-disciplinary: Democratically involves staff and
facilities from across all schools. Disciplines are
anti-social
• Experiments/challenges, not ‘modules’; Hacker
ethic.
• Student as Producer: Research-based; teachers
and students learn from each other. The institution
learns from its teacher-student scholars. A
‘Skunkworks’ for the institution.

8. Questions
• Can a university contain (intellectually, politically, practically) a
hackerspace?
• Are the two organisational and educational forms compatible?
• Who owns the programme?
• Who benefits from it? How?
• Why would a student enrol?
• How can we involve the local community?
• What is the final award?
• How are contributions (staff time, Schools’ facilities) acknowledged?
• How is the degree structured?
• How many students are required to make this work (i.e. what is the
critical size of the ‘collective’)
• What are the administrative constraints and regulatory obligations?