We want people to learn by work on projects, not just responding and filling out a worksheet, but work on projects where they design something and work on things that are meaningful to them.
The should do it with peers — we know that the best learning happens when we learn with and from other people around us, not just staying by ourselves.
We want people to work on things they’re passionate about — we know that people will work longer and harder and persist in the face of obstacles if they work on things they care about deeply.
And then play. When I say ‘play’, I don’t just mean playing games; I mean a type of attitude towards your interactions. When someone is playful in their interactions, that they’re doing things where they take risks, they test the boundaries, they try new things, they continuously experiment, and that’s the best way to develop as a creative thinker — by projects, peers, passion and play.
That’s the approach that we use here at the MIT Media Lab, and that’s what made the Media Lab, such an innovative place. It’s what’s worked in kindergarten, and now what we need to do is just take those ideas and help change the rest of the world.
How can we most effectively harness responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging the norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices?
In the early 1950s, he decided that instead of “having a steady job” – such as his position at NASA’s Ames Research Center – he would focus on making the world a better place. He reasoned that because the complexity of the world’s problems were increasing, and that any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence.
The GitHub mascot is known as an 'octocat' — a cross between two very intelligentanimals. I drew the one above for you, dear reader.
Summary: A brief overview of Git and GitHub followed by pointers to instructions on creating your own personal website hosted at yourusername.github.io for free.
Git & GitHub
Git is software for version control of files to help a person or a group of people do, publish and keep track of their work.1 One of the best things about Git is that it is free, open source software. This means that it will always be available regardless of whether a company still exists.
GitHub is a website that provides a good user interface for Git software. It is used by companies like Google — https://github.com/google — Facebook — https://github.com/facebook — and Apple — https://github.com/apple. One of the people2 who created GitHub wrote a parable that helps us see how it works. One of, if not the best, thing about GitHub is it makes it easy for anybody to use Git!
You can easily create a website for free using GitHub and work on it alone or with other people (who have your permission), and publish it on yourusername.github.io or download it to your own computer or transfer it to other servers for editing, publishing or backup.3
Most of GitHub’s software is open source, too, but if you ever want to use another system (such as GitLab) you are free to take your work with you at any time. ↩︎
Logo was my first exposure to programming back in São Paulo. Goodbye, Seymour — I’ll never forget the turtle cursor! See also: Discussion at Hacker News and Scratch, which appears to be Logo’s spiritual successor.
