House of House principle: Educate

Thursday, August 10, 2017

House of House principle: Educate


Description

In this episode of Makers Musings, Harley talks about why education is an important principle for House of Hacks. This is the second of three videos where he unpacks the second sentence in the standard closing that says "Through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage makers in their creative endeavors."

This is the tenth episode of Vlog Every Day in August 2017 (aka #SSSVEDA2017).

What you know impacts your design.

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For a written transcript, go to House of Hacks principle: Educate

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

Today at the House of Hacks, I want to talk about education.

[Intro]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

I'm going through the closing paragraph that I use in a lot of my videos where I talk about the "why" of the House of Hacks channel. I'm currently going through the sentence that says "Through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage these types of makers." And yesterday I talked about "inspiration" and why I want to be an inspiration to people. Today I want to talk about "educate" and where that fits into this channel's "why."

When you create something, you're really being inspired by everything you know to put something together in a new, innovative way. But it's based on everything you know. So the more you know, the more you have resources to draw on in your creativity.

Yesterday I talked about being inspired by multiple things where we have a lot of different streams that come together to give us inspiration for creating something new. Well, in order to have those multiple areas, you need to be educated in those multiple areas. So the more things you know, the more opportunity you have to be... to have those things impact your inspiration in your creativity.

It's been said in software development that the best languages to learn are ones that force you to think differently. It really forces you to change your perspective in how you view things and when you have different perspectives you can look at problems differently and come up with different solutions from those different perspectives and it gives you a range of things to choose from. Sometimes by switching your perspectives you actually can synthesize different perspectives together to come up with something new.

I have a video that I talked about this a little bit that I'll leave a link to that I did a while ago where I talk about this as it relates to a design project that I was working on.

So the more that you know, the more different areas that you have, the more flexibility you have in your creativity and when you're making things.

So one of the things I want to do with this channel is provide education. I have a series that I call "Bits of Binary" where I teach about how to use the binary number system as one example. And I hope to have other types of series like that that are really didactic, very teaching oriented in terms of providing new information.

I also have a "tips and tricks" series that I do occasionally where I talk about one particular skill that's useful in making things. And when you have different skills in different areas, it's just like education and knowing different things, if you have different skills in different areas it allows you to be more flexible in your approach to solving problems.

The old saying "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Well, the more tools you have in your tool bag to choose from when you're creating something the more flexibility you have in your creativity and what you're making.

So tomorrow I want to talk about the last word in that sentence: "encourage" and "encouragement" and why I think that's important for me in the material I present on this channel.

Until then, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!