Serendipity35 - Maker-DIY-SDL

Innovative Teaching or Innovative Learning

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Thu, 10 May 2018 13:30:00 +0000

I am preparing a keynote presentation innovation for a faculty at a community college. The campus recently opened a small innovation center with the hope of getting students and faculty to consider new ways of teaching and learning.

In doing some research on this area, I immediately was struck with the split I saw between topics about innovative teaching and innovative learning, as if they were different things. That made me pause. Are they different, the same or inextricably linked?

My talk - "Creating a Culture of Innovation" - will look at how society drives innovation in higher education through the challenges it presents to educators. Increasing demands to lower costs, improving completion rates, competition from alternative credentialing, and the possibility in my home state of New Jersey and other states for free two years of college will all dramatically force shifts in classroom demographics and approaches to teaching and learning.

Innovation requires innovators. In higher education, they can be faculty or administrators who promote pedagogical approaches, such as adaptive and active learning. The innovation of adaptive learning is not so much that adjustments are made to the learning process based on feedback from the learners. Good teachers have been during that forever. The innovation comes from the ways that technologies have been aiding that monitoring of feedback and automating some of the adaptive paths.

Innovation can emerge from philosophical shifts, such as moving to the use of Open Educational Resources.

Innovation can also come from the learning spaces and new technologies made available to teachers and students.

You can find many different approaches to innovation in education, and some of them have come from outside education. One that is out there is agile teaching. Agility is a topic that has been a concern and approach in the business tech world.

I continue to see examples about the changing world of work that concerns innovation and have many educators considering how they might prepare students better for what they will encounter after graduation. This does not mean job training or vocational skills. It more often is concerned with the learning process, methods of evaluating learning and seeing student applying their learning to new situations.

For those things, you might be using blended/hybrid courses whose structure is such that theory is always put into practice. Courses using makerspaces and other active learning environments address some of these concerns more than traditional lecture courses.

But I have been hearing about the departure from lecture-style, sage-on-the-stage courses for two decades, and yet I know many courses still follow that model.

In earlier posts here, I have written about innovation or innovators in education or the ideas about the disruptors that make an innovative university, I have said that companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ lives change. For example, they create newer and more powerful phones that have features customers have not asked for. Apple believes it knows what you want before you know you want it.

But I don't think that model works in education. Our students are often ahead of us with not only technology, but sometimes with innovative ways of learning. Are they ahead of many of their teachers in using their smartphones as computers and portals to information, and apps as tools? Yes.

Making More Makers

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 13:32:00 +0000

I suppose I was a "do-it-yourselfer" and a "maker" in some ways long before those terms took on new meanings. But the Maker Movement is a subculture that is a lot less "sub-" than it was a few years ago.
Back in the 1970s, when the big computers became available as personal computers (PC), it started a subculture of DIY types who were building their own computers and writing their own software. The maker movement definitely has roots in that and the hacker (in the good guy, white hat, sense of the word) movement.
In 2005, Dale Dougherty launched Make magazine to serve a community that was growing and the following year they launched Maker Faire.
Though makerspaces have varying names attached to them, they attract those DIYers who want to build something rather than just buy it. While hacker culture which is focused on software rather than the physical objects,both groups share an interest in building new creations as well as hacking at existing ones and making them something new.
A makerspace in a school setting may have a more obvious educational purposes and intentions, but all of these spaces foster an informal way of using and learning practical skills and applying them to design.

Two events that I am involved in this month use the maker approach to informal learning.

New Jersey Makers Day runs two days this year - March 18 and 19 - so that it can be marked both in schools (on Friday) and have a school audience in community spaces such as libraries on Saturday. There are many activities planned across that state in schools, libraries and other makerspaces. Last year, there were over 15,000 individual attendees at 150 participating sites, including libraries, museums, schools, commercial makerspaces, and AC Moore stores that were spread across all 21 counties of New Jersey. There is probably something similar going on where you live.
As this movement grows, companies and makers selling their creations has become a commercial segment that is also growing. This includes big companies that sell hardware like 3D printers and supplies to the individual selling custom items on a much smaller scale. Both are "shaping the future of our economy."

The NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase on March 23, 2016 at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ is focusing on STEAM - that's STEM with the needed addition of the Arts, including language arts and the digital humanities.
I am doing one of the presentations along with Emily Witkowski (Maplewood Public Library) and Danielle Mirliss (Seton Hall University) titled "The Maker Movement Connects STEAM Across New Jersey." The maker movement really fits well with the STEAM (and STEM) approach to learning.

The Maker Movement Connects STEM and STEAM

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 13:30:00 +0000

Photo: Dave Jenson - We're working on it!, CC BY-SA 2.0

Maker culture has been growing, but it contains a number of subcultures. For me, maker culture now includes hackerspaces, fab(rication) labs and other spaces that encourage a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach to innovation.

These spaces are found around the world, and some probably existed prior to the use of the makerspace label. Like-minded people use these spaces to share ideas, tools, and skills.

Some hackerspaces and makerspaces are found at universities with a technical orientation, such as MIT and Carnegie Mellon. But I have found that many of these spaces are quite closed spaces that are available to only students in particular programs or majors and perhaps not to the entire university community or the wider surrounding community.

So, spaces have also emerged in K-12 schools, public libraries, and in the community.

The NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase is an excellent venue to showcase your work, work-in-progress, or posters to the New Jersey Higher Ed and K-12 communities. This month, I will be part of a presentation along with Emily Witkowski (Maplewood Public Library) and Danielle Mirliss (Seton Hall University) titled "The Maker Movement Connects STEAM Across New Jersey." STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) gets plenty of attention these days, but this particular conference is focused on teaching innovations in STEAM - that's STEM with the needed addition of the Arts, including language arts and the digital humanities, and drawing on design principles and encouraging creative solutions.

The keynote speaker at the Showcase is Georgette Yakman, founding researcher and creator of ST?@M. The acronym, in this context, represents how the subject areas relate to each other: Science & Technology, interpreted through Engineering & the Arts, all based on mathematical elements. The A stands for a broad spectrum of the arts, going beyond aesthetics to include the liberal arts, folding in Language Arts, Social Studies, Physical Arts, Fine Arts & Music and the ways each shapes developments in STEM fields.

The Rhode Island School of Design is a good example of having a STEM to STEAM program and maintains an interactive map that shows global STEAM initiatives. John Maeda, (2008 to 2013 president of Rhode Island School of Design) has been a leader in bringing the initiative to the political forums of educational policy.

Our Showcase presentation presents three aspects of the maker movement: in classrooms, in libraries and the community, and in higher education. We are part of the NJ Maker Consortium, which brings together educators and librarians in K-12 and Higher Ed. The consortium looks to provide local support, networking, and training for individuals working to establish or grow makerspace programs in their schools or library branches.

In 2016, the second annual New Jersey Makers Day has expanded to a two-day event, March 18 and 19. This celebration of maker culture occurs in locations across NJ and connects all-ages at libraries, schools, businesses, and independent makerspaces that support making, tinkering, crafting, manufacturing, and STEM-based learning.

Connecting to Learning in Your Unretirement Years

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 09:42:00 +0000

In preparing for my talk this month on "The Disconnected," I came across the organization Encore.org that has a Higher Education Initiative which is looking at the impact of an aging population on higher education. Those that I am calling "The Disconnected" are not disconnected in a detached or disengaged sense, but are instead disconnecting from traditional modes and sources of information and learning.
I also found a podcast that is called Unretirement and one episode talked with a woman, Sandra, who felt the need to get out of the house and start doing something to help deal with her unhappiness. She signed up for a quilt making class. It lit up a passion in her. At age 58, she’s gone back to "school" to move into a new career and is getting certified to become a professional quilting instructor. That may not sound like a typical "major" or even a viable unretirement career choice, but...
“Quilting in America market is worth $3.76 billion annually” according to a trade survey trying to get at the size of the quilting economy. Sandra is not going to her local college to learn. She is not interested in credits or a degree. Quiltworx is the company from which she is getting her certification. The podcast covered why she decided to get this certification and how her family helped her figure whether the certificate was worth the cost. She has a business plan, and expects her certificate will pay off in 18 months.
The "Baby Boomers" are just one age segment of those I am finding to be part of "The Disconnected." The largest age group is much younger and includes the traditional potential students for undergraduate and graduate programs. And even younger people are being born into and growing up in a society where the disconnects will be so common that they will probably not be seen as disconnects.
Here is one example of that disconnect. I came of age in the 1960s and viewed television as a wireless (via antenna) service that was free if you owned a set and supported by advertising. If you grew up in the 1980s, you saw television as a service that came to your home via a cable service that you paid for (even paying for the formerly free networks that had advertising support) and could add additional premium services if you wanted them. You learned to supplement and control that content (starting to call it video rather than TV) using a VCR and videotapes and later DVDs and then a DVR. A child of today is likely to be using multiple networks via multiple devices and may be growing up in a household that has already cut the cord to those 1980s services and devices and hard media formats.
So, grandparents and their grandchildren may find some connectiveness in being disconnected in their media consumption and even in how they both are learning and preparing for a working life.

Here are some resources about how older adults are connecting to learning and unretirement using both traditional schools and alternatives.
Improving Education and Training for Older Workers a survey from the AARP Public Policy Institute.
Certificates: Gateway to Gainful Employment and College Degrees from Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University
How many students graduate outside the normal age?” an international study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
The Plus 50 Initiative at community colleges for learners age 50+ and a Lumina Foundation report on Plus 50
A state by state rundown of education opportunities for seniors
Over 50 and Back in College, Preparing for a New Career
The 40-Year-Old Graduates
4 Ways Older Students Can Avoid Student Debt
How to Make the Most of Longer Lives
Craft Artists, Income, and the U.S. Economy

Getting Started With Arduino

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 08:55:00 +0000

Dave Cormier did a nice post about getting his kids (7 & 9) playing and learning with an Arduino starter kit for Christmas. (Kits run about $100-150 but you can buy an Arduino board for about $20 if you're already working with maker electronics and coding.) If you are an adult, kid, parent or teacher, this first (with more to come?) post is a nice intro into this popular maker tool.
One very basic thing he discovered is that you do need to understand code. You don't need a lot of experience with it, but if you have never looked at code (even HTML web page code), it will seem a bit confusing at first.
Arduino uses a simplified version of C++ and most people will be able to figure out by context clues (Ah, like reading!) some of what the code is doing.
He also learned right away that "arduino" is also software that you need to download and put on your computer.
As you start to write you "sketch" (code) in order to upload it to your Arduino hardware via a USB cable, you discover that there are lots of sketches available online and with the arduino software itself to get you started. But you will need to learn new stuff.
He shows a simple example of some code with notes (shown above). This code tells the Arduino to send power to pin 13 and then to turn pin 13 on and off at 3 second intervals.
If your Arduino board has an LED bulb in pin 13, it will light up according to those commands.
But he also had to learn that the LED needed to plug into the ground that is right next to it and hat the long leg of the LED is the ‘+’ and it goes in pin 13 and the short leg of the LED is the ‘-‘ and goes in the ground.
Okay, that's not exactly amazing output, but Dave and his kids are a ways off from building a robotic obstacle-avoiding car (like the one in the video below) which requires more parts, some building and more coding - but it is doable.
You can read Dave's first post on his blog and follow his learning. Let's see where the Cormiers go with this.

Making Space for DIY Innovation on Campus

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 09:06:00 +0000

This week I will be at the NJEDge.Net Annual Conference whose theme this year is Rethink Refresh Reboot.- three things you should get from any good conference. NJEDge.Net is a non-profit technology consortium of academic and research institutions in New Jersey. It supports its members in their institutional teaching and learning; scholarship; research and development; outreach programs; public service, and economic development, and provides our broadband statewide network.
I'll be doing a 2-hour workshop on "Making Space for DIY Innovation on Campus" with Danielle Mirliss from Seton Hall University and Emily Witkowski, from the Maplewood Public Library.
We deliberately avoided saying "makerspaces" in the session title for two reasons. One, people who have heard of the term immediately envision a very techy room with a 3D printer and scanner and lots of computer parts, and although that does sound like a makerspace, that's not all the spaces we are talking about. These spaces can have hand tools, wood and fabrics, sewing machines, laser cutters and many other devices and tools. And they might be called innovation spaces, fabrication labs, rapid prototyping centers or hackerspaces.
These places over the past decade have increasingly increased as community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end equipment and guidance to using them.
You can work with technologies like desktop fabrication, physical computing, and augmented reality in these do-it-yourself workspaces. Naturally, the first subject areas to build and use makerspaces in schools were the STEM areas, but we are also interested in the way they are being used in for applications and research in the humanities and arts.
Our workshop will offer information on creating, branding and maintaining spaces on campus, in libraries or in the community. We will also show examples of DIY projects and discuss their applications to the classroom, and participants will try a hands-on activity.

Kindergarten Engineers

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 09:31:00 +0000

I was thinking about my earlier post about "learning engineers" after I came across a video storybook on pbslearningmedia.org called "David and Kayleen Design a Glider." Actually, the first thing I thought of was really the hundreds of balsa wood and paper gliders I had made as a kid. From those pre-cut balsa wood airplanes that all my friends bought, built and broke, to the ones I ended up building from scratch using balsa, paper and scraps, I learned the basics of aerodynamics.
Eventually, through a middle school club, I learned to make beautiful rainbow-winged microfilm planes (like the one at top) with rubber band motors that could fly for several minutes in a gymnasium or the several airplane hangars our club visited. It was pretty nerdy at the time and I loved it.
Years later, as a middle school teacher, I had a devoted little club of kids building planes from paper that were part engineering and part origami.
Building these airplanes is a way to learn about aerospace engineering, but it was also a way to learn how to follow instructions, about precision and about learning from the mistakes you and your fellow engineers made.
That video storybook page says that it is a way for children to learn about "the design and structure of airplanes and gliders, and are encouraged to understand the innovation process."
I did some digging online about the lesson and the "hoop gliders" they were building. I know that design from a book I had when I was doing that club that contained plans for folding prize-winning paper airplane designs. The hoop glider doesn't look at all like what most people would envision as a glider - which makes it a good choice of a design to use to get kids thinking about why planes fly.
One of the things I found online was written by Tom Jenkins [@tomjenkinsstem], a middle school science and STEM teacher in Ohio. He wrote Kindergarteners Are Born Engineers about a lesson he did using the video and hoop gliders with a kindergarten class.
He started them talking abou how planes fly, and asking what engineers do and, as you might expect with kids that age, the discussion went in many places. I totally get that part of it involved Thomas the Tank Engine, as many kids think of a railroad engineer first. Eventually one student says that engineers "build things” and that gets him into his true mission.
They select materials and then test and measure the flights of the gliders of their own creation. One student suggests using aluminum foil for the hoops because it is lighter, and another suggests instead strips of manila folder “because it’s less floppy.”
Sounds like a fun and good lesson. But what is most interesting to me about the lesson is what Jenkins fears and discovers.
He was afraid that the class of little ones would test the gliders, see many of them "fail" and then end up crying. He has seen that happen with older middle-schoolers.
As expected, most of the planes crashed quickly. But "not one student cried or was disheartened at all. In fact, they all ran back to their workstations and started discussing a new plan. They had failed and that was okay. They had learned a lesson and were going to continue to improve their designs until they were successful."
That is huge.
And then Jenkins realized that the problem is himself - or as Pogo said it years ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Jenkins: "These kindergärtners get it. They understand that learning is a collaborative process. Oftentimes you have to discuss the problem in order to find the best solution. Failure is also an option, and as long as you learn from your mistakes, it can be a positive experience. They had lived the engineering design process their entire lives."
He concludes that although he usually spends the first few weeks of a school year the engineering design process (and in his situation, to older kids), they already knew it and he was probably breaking them.
Kids entering school may be more likely to not fear collaboration, experimentation, guessing at a solution and even failing than the older ones who have been "taught" by assignments, correct answrs and grade to be more hesitant.
Failure is still often discouraged as a learning experience - intentionally or not - rather than seeing the gift of failure as a learning tool. We need to remember that children have "an innate ability to learn through the iterative process" and are closer to being engineers and scientists than we give them credit. Not only STEM but STEAM (with that important art and creativity segment) and DIY and maker brought into the K-16 classroom is powerful.

Pogo Earth Day 1971 poster, licensed under Fair Use via Wikipedia

The Return of the Autodidacts

ronkowitz@gmail.com (Kenneth Ronkowitz) — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 10:00:00 +0000

"Autodidact" has its roots in the Ancient Greek words autós, or "self" and didaktikos, meaning "teaching." Dacticism defines an artistic philosophy of education and autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is used to mean self-education.
Learning that is self-directed about a subject in which you have little to no formal education is hardly a new trend. Before we had any formal educational systems, everyone learned on their own. From the primitive person knocking rocks together to create a tool, to a much more privileged autodidact like Leonardo da Vinci, to the home-schooled and largely self-taught inventors like Thomas Edison, we learned on our own and through the informal teaching and example of others.
Before schooling, there were less-formal ways of being taught through craft guilds, apprenticeships, tutors and mentors. The Industrial Revolution and the accompanying creation of schools changed that.
My title,"The Return of the Autodidacts," may not be completely accurate since they never left. Schooling has made learning less self-directed, but everyone has always learned on their own to some degree. It does seem that in this young 21st century, there has been a noticeable increase in learning outside of schools. The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Maker movements, free and open online courses (MOOC) and even schools based on Self-Directed Learning (SDL), all indicate a desire to learn that is disconnected from organized classrooms and credits, certifications and degrees.

I have been writing about School 2.0 (AKA Education or University 2.0) for about six years and a lot of that touches on the idea of the individual taking the initiative and the responsibility for the learning that occurs. I heard a lot about "student-centered learning" at the end of the last century. Much of that came from the rise of online learning where the instructor has less ability to be the center of the learning.
Allowing a "student" to select, manage, and assess their own learning activities, on their own schedule opens up learning - and creates problems, especially if you are in the business of traditional education.
Lately, I hear the term "Self Directed Learning" (SDL) used more often and I see it attached to traditional schools. Some of the methods used by autodidacts have been co-opted by schools. Although it is still more likely that you would find a makerspace in a community setting or within a library, you are also seeing them as part of a school from grades K through college.
Self-directed learning also plays a role in movements such as home-schooling, experiential education, open schooling and life-long learning.
Proponents will note that the benefits extend beyond learning knowledge and skills and into a learning mindfulness for setting personal goals, planning and taking action to meet those goals with evidence of having learned. Self-improvement, personal and character development are central themes of SDL discussions. SDL involves initiating personal challenge activities and developing the personal qualities to pursue them successfully.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) is the method of building, modifying, or repairing something without the aid of experts or professionals.
The motivations to go DIY are many. You might not have the money or the traditional tools and resources to buy or even make something. Perhaps the item just isn't available to you, or even to anyone. You may be disappointed in the quality of existing products. You may want a personally customized version of something. Maybe it is a sense of pride in creating something on your own, whether it is for your own use or for display or sale.
The term "do-it-yourself" has been associated with consumers since at least the early 20th century when it was usually connected to home improvement and maintenance (such as an automobile) activities. By the mid-century, it was in more common usage due to the emergence of a trend of people undertaking home improvement and various other small craft and construction projects as both a creative-recreational and cost-saving activity.
The maker movement grew from the DIY movement and led to communal spaces (makerspaces) that allowed access to workspace, tools and materials that many individuals could not afford. At one time that may have meant power tools, but today it includes laser cutters, 3D printers and computer-aided design tools. These spaces also can offer informal training and mentoring from other members. It brings the old models of craft guilds, apprenticeships, tutoring and mentoring back. Perhaps, it truly is a time of the return of the autodidact.