My name is Mel. I've been called a hacker by other hackers. I have a large piece of paper saying "Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering" and a small piece of paper saying "One Laptop Per Child QA/Support Engineer," but my favorite tags are from teammates: "Swiss Army Person" and "hack of all trades."

My quest is to make a world where makers make themselves. When I'm not helping half a million kids in developing countries keep their school laptops running, I explore the space between how hackers learn and how engineers are taught. (Translation: I research undergraduate and graduate engineering education so that I may better tinker within it as a professor in the future.) You'll also find me running unconferences, teaching electronics workshops, coaching fellow hackers on their presentations, translating docs from geekspeak to English and using the resulting task descripts to do the work of 5,000 people by recruiting volunteers (the infamous "cat-herding" job), writing textbooks, and moonlighting as an improvisational personal chef and jazz pianist.

You may also know me from the MIT Media Lab, Design Continuum, Appropedia, Fab Labs, or The Open Planning Project. Pressed for a short job description, I would say that I engineer educations.

My introduction to open source, Linux, and programming involves some high school friends and a stack of Debian install floppies. I live in .txt, .c, .cpp, .scm, and .py files. Open source software has also led me into the related topics of open licenses, open content, and (the young but burgeoning field of) open education. My choice to major in electrical engineering is a canonical masochism story involving a dartboard and the decision to study the field I had the least background in and the most terror of.

Non-standard modifiers: I was the first person in my Chinese-Filipino family to be schooled outside the developing world, and am a first-generation immigrant to the hardware, software, and open-source internet communities as well. I grew up as a book-addicted tomboy and a "disabled" kid with a hearing loss severe enough to warrant a host of technological aids, special classes, and a full-time sign language interpreter. This has shaped many of my attitudes towards education, access, technology, globalization, development, and design.

I frequently speak and write about things that fall into one of these categories.

1. Hacking, or How To Make Things Work. (Lately this has largely been "How to contribute to OLPC", followed closely by "So You Want To Make Something With Electrons In It.")
2. Getting Things Done in Technical Academia: the systems of processes and people who make decisions on how our future engineers will learn, and how you can tweak them no matter who or where you are in the system.
3. Surprising Mastery: what is the route from anti-prodigy to mastery within a field? What makes people perservere at something they're initially terrible at, and how do they transform from "utterly confused" to "one of the best in this domain"?