Presented at the CETIS/CIEPD event Future Learners, new Opportunities and Technology at the University of Nottingham on 11th December 2012

1. is hacking the
university
Involving learners in the re-
production of the university
Joss Winn, jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk, http://lncd.lincoln.ac.uk, @lncd @josswinn

2. JISC commissioned Case Study on Institutional Approaches to Openness
http://j.mp/SaPHack

3. Key Points
• Student as Producer became a formal HEA-funded project in 2010.
• It was developed by the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD) which was
itself established in 2007 to lead the University of Lincoln's Teaching and Learning Strategy.
• Student as Producer emphasises the role of the student as collaborators in the production of
knowledge and makes research-engaged teaching an institutional priority.
• Work at Lincoln is inspired by “the key academic values that motivated the early academic
hacker culture: autonomy, the sharing of knowledge and creative output, transparency
through peer review, and peer-recognition based on merit.”
• “we see our work as fundamentally a form of hacking using and writing open source software
and producing open data with which to ‘hack the university’ and create useful services and
positive technological interventions in the research, teaching and learning environment of
the university.”
• “openness remains a distinct theme throughout our work, both in the tools we use and the
way we organise ourselves as a distributed, collegial group.”
• A student intern post has been set up within LNCD, a body that consolidates the university’s
open projects, to ensure “that the student perspective remains core to the group’s outlook.”
• We have (had!) a budget to provide incentives to students and staff to work on collaborative
projects.

4. What we did/you can do
• Emphasise the role of the student as
collaborators in the production of knowledge.
• Look to establish student internships and
employ people from within the student body.
• Establish an academic commons to share
knowledge open access and open education.
• Experiment with open source software and
establish projects that use and develop open
source principles.