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Is It Time For Hacker Scouts?
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine asks: is it 'Time For Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts 2.0?' What might the future of education be like if it were based on online & earned skill badges, and what could the future of traditional organizations for kids, like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, be like in a very modern, tech-savvy world? Social networks and the maker movement are the perfect intersection of where the kids of today are, but we don't see 'leaderboards' for skills yet; we only see them for video games. Is it time for Hacker Scouts?"
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My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
untrustworthy, disloyal, surly,
angry, rude, mean,
obstinant, cranky, greedy,
anonymous, smelly, irreverent
Yes, probably. Let's roll some tech into it.
But do NOT lose the outdoor aspect. Camping, etc. Far, far too many kids have no clue what the "big green room with the blue and white ceiling" looks and smells like.
There is a coder Scouts, called Coder Dojo http://coderdojo.com/
Kids need to be outside and learn useful things. The Internet is pretty easy to use, coding and configuring software is best left to teachers or summer camps. The scout programs really need to stick to their guns, don't spoil a good thing. Theyre one of the last bastions of real childhood enrichment.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I do not think it is necessary to reform all organizations to match some illusionary techno elite mold.
Scouts/Guides teach different skills, like what the sun looks like and how to get along with others, that are not well represented by the can't-lift-face-from-LCD crowd.
Badges are about basic skills and sense of accomplishment (little milestones met). Leaderboards are about competition. Each has their merit.
P.S. Get off my lawn
Isn't the point of scouts is to get kids out of the basement to move and do something?
Yes, the core Scouting organizations could use online resources for organizational purposes or for some merit badges that could be done online.
However, most of the valuable experiences from scouting can only be gained in person - experiencing things in real life. Camping. Swimming. Hiking. Shooting. Meeting people in various fields and getting a real education about a topic (even if it is cursory), Etc.
However, online scouting would lose a lot of the value you get by interacting with live people who can share their experiences.
I just wanted to mention that the Boys and Girls scouts of America do not allow homosexuals into leadership positions, youth or adult.
Moreover they completely bar atheists and agnostics from membership of any kind.
Support them if you so desire but do so with full awareness of what you are supporting.
There are a lot of comments on the Boy and Girl Scout associations, but not yet many on the use of online merit badges as an alternative educational model.
Imagine educational sites done easily in Drupal, in which users learned skills and knowledge sets about... well, anything. Skillsets disruptive to the status quo, for instance. Hacking. Encryption. True American Common Law. All manner of "disruptive" information. They could earn merit badges and level them up just as they do in an RPG, and display or link them on social networking sites and in their .sig files on sites like Slashdot. As they promoted their learning and interests, others would notice and learn about them as well if they found the material interesting. From there, it's not much of a stretch to imagine them getting together in online forums of interest groups. And then you'd have an alternative model of information distribution from the mainstream media. You'd also have a mechanism for giving people the skills they need to overcome the status quo.
As a bonus, geeks who created sites like that could charge users a negligible amount of BitCoins in monthly dues once they'd leveled past a certain point. The interesting part would be that the moment users became responsible for monthly dues, they would also be eligible for a portion of dues paid by any other new users they'd brought to the site. It would provide some great incentive for users to not only promote awareness by displaying the badges they'd earned, but also mentoring their recruits - thus assisting in the transmission of the information. Anyone doing that actively would find learning and teaching skills of interest to them online would be a sort of profit model, and that they were accruing far more from it than they were paying out.
By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very easy to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality and fixing society while making money for yourself in the process.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
It's called an "explorer post." My troop was hosted by a kids Dad who was an engineer at a company that made Mars rover prototypes for NASA. We made websites for ourselves to start out, which they hosted on the companies web server (*nix running apache), and after we learned http we made websites for for car dealerships and other small businesses to raise money for the post. Among the many cool activities we did, they also let us program very expensive Mars rover prototypes to walk around and explore the office and we had challenges to see who could program the best runs etc...
That experience, and having a computer in my room at very young age, are probably the two biggest reasons why I ended up choosing a career in Engineering. I have often thought that if I ever get off my lazy butt to do something good for the community it would be a technology explorer post like the one I was lucky enough to get into.
1978, we spent Tuesday evenings with full run of the computer ( IBM 370/158 ) at Exxon R&D. Occasional field trips to places like the Sarnoff Labs ( RCA ), and
Bell Labs. It was at Bell Labs I was introduced to C and Unix by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. Little did I realize that I was going to make a career out of that.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
A regular series from the old days of Popular Electronics magazine. Some of them are available online at:
http://www.copperwood.com/carlandjerry.htm
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The idea is not to expose kids to technology. They are surrounded by it already. They can't help but be "exposed."
The idea is to expose technology to the kids. Far too much of modern technology comes with the implied "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!", and not nearly enough "oh, you like the glowing green head projector? Here's how to make him have boobies on his head and a snidley whiplash mustache! And this button makes him sound like a chipmunk! Would you like your own big green glowing head projector? Awesome! Here's how I made mine!"
There is far too much compartmentalization in modern society, and due to that, there is a very large demographic that relies on children not being more savvy than them with tech. This is mostly in educational and political circles. This reliance makes a conflict of interest when it comes to tech; they teach just enough to use, but not enough to comprehend and adapt the tech. (They call this a wide variety of things, but the most common is "abuse" of the technology, or vandalism.)
Maker scouts would focus on kids that have already been exposed to the tech, and want to learn more. It would actively encourage novel applications of technology, and the creation of disruptive appliances. In short, it would be every technology teacher's nightmare come true, where the kids learn dangerous things like assembler, kernel hacking, lowlevel electronics and computer logic, and graduate from drawing penises on the lab computers, to creating network worms that do it for them.
I would really love to see something like this, but I realize that most people would consider this on par with having a terrorist training camp for cyber terrorists.
The idea is exactly the opposite though. Terror comes from ignorance, and learned helplessness more often than not. This would seek to break that trend. The kids that come out would know what real cyberwarfare is, and laugh at the antics paraded around on the news, like many of us do.
My sole experience in Scouting was with an Explorer post at what was then the Oklahoma City Western Electric works where my mother worked. A group of us (I remember two sisters and their brother and myself) went there, I forget how many evenings a week, and learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 and FOCAL and PDP-8 assembly language (on a PDP-8, of course). That would be around 1973 or 1974.
As an Eagle Scout myself, I know I learned many fundamentals of electronics, radio communication, metal working and even helped build a hero robot as a troop project. Really there is everything from wilderness survival (which is what pops into most peoples mind) and basket weaving, but in all if there is a topic, there is a badge where you can learn the basics as a child.
do I support the activities mentioned in the article? yes, but its amusing because its already there ...other than buy a 500 3d printer from us cause your kid needs to know something that will become a toaster in 20 years, but drafting and cad, which are useful skills are already a badge
http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/BoyScouts/AdvancementandAwards/MeritBadges/mb-DRAF.aspx
guess where I learned how to do it first?