Sumana Harihareswara

“ If there’s any members of Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth Team here they might be kind of bouncing up and down, because that’s a lot of what they help enable. The idea of legitimate peripheral participation is “Here’s a main, hard, complex activity that only the most expert people in a community can do” but sort of coming out in ripples from that are smaller, less complex, easier to learn tasks, where if people do the easier to learn tasks first while they can look over the shoulders of the experts, they’ll learn more. ”

“ My friend Mel Chua, who's a Wikipedian and an education researcher, once summarized these three lessons as super important for us to learn, as: one, learning is designable like code; two, our brains are snowflakes, we learn differently; and three, we do not function standalone, we learn in communities. So I lived through all these lessons in the autumn, at Hacker School. ”

“ When someone is criticized for doing something inhospitable, the first response needs to not be “Oh, but remember their edit count. Remember he’s done X or she’s done Y for this community.” We need to start treating hospitality as a first class virtue, and see that it is the seed of everything else. Alberto Brandolini said “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” ”

“ I think we’ve seen this in my own experience at Hacker School, and we see that also the invite-only spaces, or spaces where everybody coming in agrees to follow the same rules so it’s a place where you feel safer -- these are like tidepools, places where certain kinds of people and certain kinds of behaviour can be nurtured and grown so that it’s ready to go out into the wider ocean. ”

“ You may have heard of Carol Dweck's research on the fixed versus the growth models of how we look at the world and learning. The short summary is, if you believe that talent is nurture and practice, then you’ll grow. But if you believe that some people are just good at X, if it’s inborn or nature, then we won’t learn. And I was able to learn at Hacker School because it was safe to fail. ”

“ If you are having a bad day, if you are worried about being good enough, if you find it demoralizing that someone told you were wasting your time trying to contribute to some open source project, you are not weak for having these problems and talking about them openly. If we are publicly vulnerable then we can also help each other.
Speaking about being vulnerable, now's when I talk about what it's like to be a woman in Wikimedia. Especially when I'm the only woman in the room. There's an xkcd about what it feels like to be the only woman in the room. ”

“ The vast majority of the stuff that’s happening is being done ad hoc, by volunteers, people helping each other, but we agree there are some things it’s really useful for paid people to do. At Hacker School there are five paid facilitators, who do things like helping people set and reach their learning goals, and directing them to resources, and starting them off with things like pair programming. And there are diversity goals at Hacker School, and that feels familiar to you, probably. ”

“ I learn best by setting small goals for myself, to combine textbook learning with making little apps or websites. And I learn with and from others. It is important for me to be around other people in person and online, so that I can learn from them and I can teach them. For me, it has to be reciprocal. And it worked! I learned a lot at Hacker School. I came in a dabbler and I came out a much better programmer. ”

“ You know, if you’re sweeping up sawdust in a woodworking shop and then learning to measure while you watch other people doing the really complicated cuts, you’ll learn more. You’ll see how long things take, what the rhythm is, what kinds of decisions you have to make. And the Growth Team has been helping people find legitimate peripheral participation in editing through things like typo fixes. ”

“ In the book Women's Ways of Knowing around community confirmation, there’s also an observation that some groups, especially many women, find that confirmation and community are prerequisites rather than consequences of learning certain hard things. ”

“ Well, yeah, but I think a lot of us contribute to that mission in very different ways and have somewhat different conceptions of what it is; some of us contribute to Wikisource, or to Commons, some of us care more about editing, some about programming, some about design, some about outreach – it can be fuzzy, and Hacker School is much more concentrated. Every single person there is just there to become a better programmer, even if they’re learning different languages, and so on. ”

“ The How Learning Works book points out that we have known about stereotype threat since 1995. We have known that if you point out to members of a marginalized group “Hey, hi there Member of Marginalized Group, did you know you’re marginalized here?”, that’s going to decrease performance and their willingness to be vulnerable. And there are different kinds of accepting climates for marginalized groups. DeSurra and Church, also in How Learning Works, talk about the climate for people who are LGBT. A community might be explicitly marginalizing, overtly discriminatory ”

“ We have the 4 social rules up on the wall, framed, at Hacker School, and sometimes people will, while referencing it, unconsciously turn their bodies towards them, because it’s that much in our core values. If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. ”

“ Vulnerability Sumana delivering this talk Community management is a first-class responsibility at Hacker School. Every one of the five facilitators who are the only employees at Hacker School are community managers. That’s a big part of their job. They will help with any kind of problem, including the brains of everyone trying to work, and including helping you with having a bad day, with your emotional fears and anxieties as well. Emotions are first class citizens. ”

“ Hacker School has a selection process, and not everyone gets in. They aren’t that big on you having to be some kind of hotshot programmer. They are totally fine with letting in people who have, let’s say, two months of programming experience, or twenty years of programming experience. ”

“ For instance, the Felder-Silverman Engineering Learning Styles suggest four main axes that different people vary on. Either way is good, but if you’re just going to be tailoring something for someone, they’ll learn even better.
Some people are more active learners: they want to bump into things and make mistakes, and that’s how they learn. Some people are more reflective learners: they prefer to look at a map first. Some people are more sensing learners: they prefer concrete examples. ”

“ Some people are more intuitive learners, and they like to look at patterns and think about how things connect together. Visual versus verbal: do people want to make diagrams, or read or listen to words? And sequential and global: does your learning proceed along LEGO brick by LEGO brick, or do you sort of fall in and then have a big epiphany a little bit later. ”

“ And when you’re doing something you’re an expert at, you do that without thinking about it too much, but helping people get that into their muscle memory is a process in itself, and it’s one worth designing. ”

“ Also, to keep us from accidentally discouraging other people from doing the things they need to do to learn, at Hacker School there are four social rules. These are social rules to help everyone feel okay with failure and ignorance. ”

“ In fact, a lot of Hacker Schoolers do their work either by making small open source projects or contributing to them, and so it felt very familiar to me in various ways, and I think we can learn from how they’re achieving certain goals that we couldn’t, necessarily. ”

“ When you look at how our editathons have been able to increase attendance by women by starting with the social aspect, I think you can see how this plays out in practice. Software Carpentry, another learning outreach project, has also been able to increase attendance by underrepresented groups at their bootcamps by suggesting that people bring their friends. ”

“ They appeal to me in much the same way that Wikimedia does, in that it’s experimental and it’s very consensus-driven. There’s a lot of ad-hocracy. Many things have changed from month to month and year to year at Hacker School, iteratively and experimentally, and there are different people on different projects and everyone has something to learn and teach each other. ”

“ Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. ”

“ If you were making clothes, you will have to make more than 1 size of shoe. If you were making almost anything, you would have to think about that. And different people really learn incredibly differently. ”

“ To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed. ”

“ If you’re going to try things, you’re going to fail sometimes, you’re going to make mistakes in front of other people, and people learn a lot slower if they’re afraid to fail, if they’re slower to ask questions. ”

“ That’s about another different kind of learning environment that’s more like Wikimedia in some ways than Hacker School is. The Outreach Program for Women is a mentorship and learning project that MediaWiki, Wikidata, and a number of other aligned groups and organizations participate in. ”

“ In "Fostering diversity -- not a boring chore, a critical opportunity", she gave examples of how other movements increased diversity and gained from it, and told the audience what to do to improve diversity within Wikimedia projects. The "Generation Wikipedia" project that Keilana and Ocaasi proposed ran into some difficulties and couldn't get started but seemed really promising on this front. "Bringing More Women to Free Software: What's Working for Us", Karen Sandler's presentation Friday afternoon at Wiki Conference USA. The Hacker School manual including the four social rules. ”

“ That makes the other person feel a little bit bad and makes them less likely to show you vulnerability in the future. It makes them more likely to go off and surround themselves in a protective shell of seeming knowledge before ever contacting you again.
Well-actuallys. That’s the pedantic corrections that don’t make a difference to the conversation that’s happening. Sometimes it’s better to err on the side of clarity rather than precision. ”