I loved reading about the maker movement and the digital fabrication paper. I can see how these methods of learning would probably really engage students and gear their education towards real world action and problem-solving.

However, I have a few questions about it. Coming from a place where the best schools in the country have around 50 kids in a class and the worst don’t even have proper teachers, I can see how these movements can remain inaccessible to a large part of the world’s population. Given this, won’t this just lead to greater educational equity and lead to the further mystifying of technology for some parts of the world?

Additionally, I’m not sure how I feel about “the activity, which was originally a history project, becoming a sophisticated mathematics project. ” The reverse is hardly ever true and never encouraged to be true as a result of any movement. If as a society we start valuing “making”, “creating” and “innovating”, where will the traditional humanities which lay emphasis on thinking and analyzing fall? Given there already diminishing importance won’t this just lead to further issues?

In this particular example, it seemed as if the class learnt the actual history aspect of i.e. the architectural features of the various monuments pretty quickly and spent majority of the time designing and building it. That sounds like engineering/architecture with a bit of history thrown in to me.

Despite this disparity, I think I still gained a lot of value out of having a technology-minded parent because I was able to observe and model his behaviors towards technology. When I did express initiated interest in engineering and computer science later, his role shifted to that of a resource provider (driving) and encouragement to continue pursuing my interest. The study did leave me wondering how much sooner I could have pursued computer science and what societal factors lead parents to be more inclined to introduce boys to technology.

The article Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention also made me curious to know more about how people develop “maker” identities, and how strongly this impacts first-time users of a makerspace.

One major challenge my team faced was that these students don’t  follow the “do it yourself” or “do it with others” mindset. Is it possible to inspire this mindset? To what extent?

My main takeaway from my visit to Barron Park was that the teacher is the key component of a successful maker space. Ms. Kolhatkar has identified the needs of her students and develops projects that will interest them, not always necessarily using the flashiest and newest technology. The Margolis, Goode, and Chapman article mentions that the “secret sauce” of success is “passionate, creative teachers who are interested in the problem solving of computer science, with a variety of secondary subject credentials.” The issue of access to these teachers is vital to the success of the Maker Space movement.

Most of the children interviewed in the Barron, Martin, Takeuchi, and Fithian don’t even need to make it to school to learn about computer science–they have parents that are well-connected in the technology industry. For instance, we have stories of Alex’s father expressing his colleagues’ interest in reviewing his son’s code or the parent who paid his daughter $25 to debug his software. Only in the wealthy enclaves of Silicon Valley could these kind of experiences be viewed as a possibility.

What about all the other kids? How can the fantastic learning opportunities of students with fantastic maker space instructors and tech savvy parents be made available across the economic spectrum? I saw that Marc also posted this excellent video: https://vimeo.com/110616469. Leah Buechley’s talk really gets at the heart of the issue–it is up to the Maker Movement’s leaders (who are mainly teachers themselves) to expand access. Perhaps its an unfair burden to ask of overtaxed educators, but without a true step towards equality in representation, the Maker Movement will fail precisely because of its success with wealthy engineers. This group has effectively blocked others from joining.

]]> https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-9-response-3/feed/ 0 https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-9-response/ https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-9-response/#respond Thu, 03 Mar 2016 01:47:51 +0000 http://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/?p=1583 I am taking the “Beyond Bits and Atoms” course with Prof. Blikstein this semester so I was very familiar with the content in his article and that of Peppler and Bender. I think it’s important to share with the students in this class some of what we’ve discussed there, because there are critical tensions between the theory in Blikstein’s article and the reporting in Peppler and Bender.

In Blikstein’s section 2, he explores the constructivist, constructionist, and critical pedagogy philosophical roots of Maker pedagogy. From this perspective, Maker learning is meant to buttress its students’ development in ways that extend beyond STEM classes. Very succinctly,it is meant to support their development in an object and creative-oriented atmosphere, and to expose them to ways of thinking that are nontraditional, for the learning of tangible and intangible skills and understandings.

Contrast this with Peppler and Bender’s article. Their description of the Maker movement is very community-oriented, with a focus on a Maker identity and movement. They focus quite a bit on the material aspects of Makerism and the concrete products to be made. There is no hint of the deep theory that Maker space pedagogy taps into, and they left me with the sense that the defining qualities of a Maker space are which gadgets they have.

Blikstein has written about this less-theoretical approach to Makerism. We see a little of this in the “keychain syndrome” portion of the reading, and for anyone interested in further critique, I recommend his and Marcelo Worsley’s article “Children are Not Hackers,” which concerns their fears about shallow interpretations of the Maker movement. I also recommend this speech by Leah Buechley about Maker magazine and Maker Faire (these were both readings in Beyond Bits and Atoms). In brief, there are serious equity concerns about an interpretation of the movement that focuses too much on product over process and on STEM over more general personal development, and identity worries that the pedagogical Maker movement may be overtaken by well-to-do, adult “hackers” who like tech and are demographically nearly homogenous.

I can’t do the issues justice in this small space so I hope you will explore these links. I think good Maker pedagogy has a lot of potential, but am concerned that Peppler and Bender’s profile of it leans more “hacker” than “maker.”

Some educators are beginning to incorporate principals of the Maker Movement in schools and believe in “the maker movement’s potential to transform how and what people learn in STEM.” Hands-on learning is a very popular way to engage students in activities. However, most schools do not have great reputations for creating truly engaging hands-on learning experiences. Instead, I believe, schools tend to draw boundaries and organize inauthentic experiences. Will schools be able to avoid drawing boundaries? If schools are to implement the Maker Movement, what will they need to consider while implementing? How will schools avoid watering down the experiences?