School for Hackers / Mark Frauenfelder; Hard Fun & comments
Paul D. Fernhout
for OM. :-)
From:
"School for Hackers: The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing."
by Mark Frauenfelder (Editor-in-chief of Make Magazine)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218
"""
Imagine a school where kids could do the following: clone jellyfish DNA;
build gadgets to measure the electrical impulses of cockroach neurons; make
robotic blackjack dealers; design machines that can distinguish between
glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers and sort them into separate
bins; and convert gasoline-burning cars to run on electric power.
No such school exists, but in August I went to Detroit and met the kids
who did all these things, and more. They�along with 22,000 other people�had
come from all over the United States and Canada to demo their creations at
Maker Faire, a two-day festival of do-it-yourselfers, crafters, musicians,
urban homesteaders, kit makers, scientists, engineers, and curious visitors
who congregated to present projects, give performances, and swap ideas.
Having attended eight Maker Faire events since 2006 (they�re put on by the
same company that owns the magazine I edit), I�ve become convinced of two
things about children and education: (1) making things is a terrific way to
learn, and (2) schools are failing to teach kids to learn with their hands.
The ideal educational environment for kids, observes Peter Gray, a
professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the way children
learn, is one that includes �the opportunity to mess around with objects of
all sorts, and to try to build things.� Countless experiments have shown
that young children are far more interested in objects they can control than
in those they cannot control�a behavioral tendency that persists. In her
review of research on project-based learning (a hands-on, experience-based
approach to education), Diane McGrath, former editor of the Journal of
Computer Science Education, reports that project-based students do as well
as (and sometimes better than) traditionally educated students on
standardized tests, and that they �learn research skills, understand the
subject matter at a deeper level than do their traditional counterparts, and
are more deeply engaged in their work.� In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan
Ariely, a behavioral psychologist at Duke University, recounts his
experiments with students about DIY�s effect on well-being and concludes
that creating more of the things we use in daily life measurably increases
our �feelings of pride and ownership.� In the long run, it also changes for
the better our patterns of thinking and learning.
Unfortunately, says Gray, our schools don�t teach kids how to make
things, but instead train them to become scholars, �in the narrowest sense
of the word, meaning someone who spends their time reading and writing. Of
course, most people are not scholars. We survive by doing things.�
So it makes sense that members of the DIY movement see education itself
as a field that�s ripe for hands-on improvement. Instead of taking on the
dull job of petitioning schools to change their obstinate ways, DIYers are
building their own versions of schools, in the form of summer camps,
workshops, clubs, and Web sites. Tinkering School in Northern California
helps kids build go-karts, watchtowers, and hang gliders (that the kids fly
in). Competitions like FIRST Robotics (founded by Segway inventor Dean
Kamen) bring children and engineers together to design and build
sophisticated robotics. �Unschooler� parents are letting their kids design
their own curricula. Hacker spaces like NYC Resistor in Brooklyn and Crash
Space in Los Angeles offer shop tools and workshops for making anything from
iPad cases to jet packs. Kids in the Young Makers Program (just launched by
Maker Media, Disney-Pixar, the Exploratorium, and TechShop) have built a
seven-foot animatronic fire-breathing dragon, a stop-motion camera rig, a
tool to lift roofing supplies, and new skateboard hardware.
When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only
picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her
creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement
with the world around her. But since these things can�t be measured on a
standardized test, schools no longer focus on them. As our public
educational institutions continue down this grim road, they�ll lose value as
places of learning. That may seem like a shame, but to the members of the
growing DIY schooling movement, it�s an irresistible opportunity to roll up
their sleeves.
"""
Also, related to that, is a five minute video about Mark Frauenfelder's
journey into making more of his own stuff, including how when you make
things yourself they have stories, and linking this to a change in our
culture after WWII and losing an important part of human existence as tool
makers and tool users as a human need:
"Boing Boing Co-Founder Mark Frauenfelder on Maker Education"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/boing-boing-co-founder-mark-frauenfelder-on-maker-education/63017/
As Mark Frauenfelder suggests, from the fossil record, we've had opposable
thumbs useful to make things longer than we've been labeled "human". So,
making stuff (and using it), is, as he suggests, an important fundamental
human need.
Here is a related suggestion by me, although it is not DIY except in the
sense of crafting an idea for a proposal to the government: :-)
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA"
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
Anyway, that, IMHO, is what is probably going to happen, eventually --
widespread government support for the equivalent of TechShops and FabLabs.
But it may not happen until there are hundreds of examples everywhere that
people have built up as a labor of love, to address a common "failure of the
imagination" when confronted with new ideas (or, sometimes, very old ones. :-)
And people might rightly question to what degree government involvement will
ruin things, even though, in defense of government involvement in some
things, nobody says much about local and federal support of book-based
libraries at this point (except generally good stuff, and even if it took
Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy to actually get a bunch of book libraries
built across the USA, to extend an idea Benjamin Franklin popularized around
Philadelphia). If we are going to bother taxing communities at all, is not
supporting a local common library of tools and skills a good idea?
(Obviously, I'm mostly preaching to the choir, here. :-)
Anyway, for people looking for support for creating DIY communities,
promoting the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) aspects is one
obvious way (although it kind of buys into the school ideology to phrase it
that way). Still, I can wonder if the point Mark makes, to connect that
proposal to the fundamental human experience and a fundamental need to make
stuff, may be even more important than "STEM" in terms of truly gathering
lots of support within a community? So, why not be up front about it (in
whatever way presents that idea effectively in our respective cultures and
organizations)?
For example, how would one apply that idea of the human need to make things
in a historical society? That's not just a theoretical question for me, as
last night I was formally voted on to the board of a non-profit local
historical society we have been involved with for about eight years. I
would expect the point that Mark makes about the change in culture after
WWII would resonate with anyone interested in preserving (in an active way)
the better parts of US history. So, within the context of our local
historical society, I am going to see, over time, how Mark's very clearly
put message can fit into its educational mission, maybe to promote more
"making" related activities (and there are some aspects of that already
within the organization to build on). Obviously, I'm not very good at
clearly and succinctly crafted messages, so I'll have to work on that. :-)
But I think Mark has outlined in his video essentially an emotional strategy
to connect the active past to our ongoing future, one that can apply in a
lot of contexts, whether backward-looking historical societies,
present-oriented alternative schools, or forward-facing FabLabs.
And I've been learning that to be whole and happy people, we need all three
perspectives -- past, present, and future -- as suggested here by Philip
Zimbardo and John Boyd:
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
(I'll have more to say on that in a next post.)
Anyway, so I'd suggest that this emotion stuff is important in that sense. I
forget where I read it (possibly G. William Domhoff) but someone made
essentially the point that when you appeal to a person's economic interests,
they may invest a bit of money, but when you appeal to a person's emotional
interests, they may invest their entire life.
It's probably easy for, especially in a frequently "macho" making culture in
the USA (ignoring all the stuff many women make every day, like food or
social relationships), to overlook the soft-seeming emotional resonance of
making things and actively using things you've made. I mean, we make stuff
because it's important for bringing home the spinach, not because it wimpily
"resonates emotionally", right? :-)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wimp (For the Popeye reference)
So, it's easy to dismiss those genuine feeling as irrational or unimportant
(or unmanly). Especially when constantly inundated with commercial messages
to buy, buy, buy premade things and save time (as in time for what? making
stuff, ironically? :-) But, as Mark points out, making stuff (and using
stuff we've made) is a deep part of what makes us human (and that probably
goes for tools, food, knowledge, or relationships).
And, for example, that's probably, for example, also why I keep chugging
along on the Pointrel System and so on, even long after RDF and so on are
standards. :-)
http://www.twirlip.net/
And becoming ever more backward looking as far as time perspective? We'll
see. :-)
So, in that sense, would it be fair to say that a closed proprietary world
(whether of music, videos, software, stuff, machinery, news, or even
carefully regulated planned communities) is making us all less "human" as
compared with open equivalents?
A related term, "Homo Faber" as Latin for "Man, the Maker":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber
(I'm not intending to be sexist there... So, "Humanity, the Makers"? :-)
It says at that Wikipedia article though, sadly, "In anthropology, Homo
faber (as �the working man�) is confronted with �Homo ludens� (the �playing
man,� who is concerned with amusements, humor and leisure)."
But, personally, I do no think work and fun can be separated, or should be.
To see why I think that, consider:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ea1ada27f0302602
For example, even as there is a lot of stuff to do that is not especially
fun, it might be at least more fun if we looked at it just right and from a
creative open manufacturing perspective -- like making a toilet scrubbing
robot or collaborating to create a self-cleaning toilet material instead of
endlessly scrubbing toilets. Examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9vaqsd1iP4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcpZgp23nzM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
It seems that, at least for the DIY/Maker/OpenManufacturing movements, that
it is the combination of fun and making that drives a lot of progress, in
the "hard fun" kind of way Seymour Papert talks about. From:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
"I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other
things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out
of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which
traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a
more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out
of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My
whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that
will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master
difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy
to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the
"touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language
that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged
neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own
enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day.
Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer
language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using
these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo."
I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather
than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it
and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of
which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging
things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual
and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge
educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must
connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and
(don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world. ..."
Anyway, just stuff to think about as far as growing the OM community...
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ted Hall
Here is a related suggestion by me, although it is not DIY except in the sense of crafting an idea for a proposal to the government: :-)
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA"
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
Anyway, that, IMHO, is what is probably going to happen, eventually -- widespread government support for the equivalent of TechShops and FabLabs. But it may not happen until there are hundreds of examples everywhere that people have built up as a labor of love, to address a common "failure of the imagination" when confronted with new ideas (or, sometimes, very old ones. :-)
John Griessen
> Here's the bill:
> http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-6003
> Ted Hall, ShopBot Tools
> [And in shameless promotion of upcoming talk: I'll be talking about digital fabrication at the World Maker Faire, NYC, this Sunday
> afternoon.]
I looked up the current wording of HR6003 at thomas.loc.gov by searching for fab lab:
(a) Establishment- The National Fab Lab Network incorporated by this Act (hereinafter in this section referred to as the `NFLN')
is hereby authorized and empowered to receive either real or personal property and to hold the same absolutely or in trust, and to
invest, reinvest, and manage the same in accordance with the provisions of its constitution and to apply said property and the
income arising therefrom to the objects of its creation and according to the instructions of its donors.
(b) In General- The National Fab Lab Network (NFLN) shall exist as a nonprofit entity whose purpose is to facilitate the piece by
piece construction of an actual network of connected labs. The NFLN itself shall not represent an overseeing, regulating, or
coordinating body of this distributed network, but will merely exist to facilitate its construction.
<snip>
(d) Functions-
(1) To serve as the coordinating body...
(2) To serve as the first point of contact for organizations interested in constructing and operating a Fab Lab and to maintain
a first-come first-serve wait list of those organizations.
(3) To work out to the satisfaction of NFLN staff and board members the ability of interested organizations to successfully host a
Fab Lab. ...
(4) To match those organizations who meet with the NFLN's approval...
(5) To advertise or perform other outreach activities to those organizations that might have interest ...
<snip>
Purposes- In carrying out its functions, the NFLN's purposes and goals shall be--
(1) to facilitate the construction of a new type of information and digital fabrication infrastructure; specifically,
in all its actions to facilitate and encourage the construction of a decentralized network of connected Fab Labs;
(2) to promote the goals of greater science, technology, engineering, and math education, workforce development in
the areas of manufacturing and product design, increased innovation and invention in the private sector, as well as scientific and
academic discovery through the use of distributed digital fabrication tools; and
(3) to seek to establish at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten
years of its operation.
(f) Funding- The NFLN may accept donations from private individuals, corporations, government agencies, or other organizations.
-----------
The key details that give this a flavor are 1 fab lab per 700K people, and goals are set out by donors of equipment,
who can be corps or individuals or govt. and first come first served as far as creating a list of interested
fab lab groups...
John Griessen
Paul D. Fernhout
Thanks for the interesting news:
"H.R.6003 -- National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010 (Introduced in House -
IH) by Rep. Bill Foster [D-IL14]"
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:h6003:
"(3) to seek to establish at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals
in the United States in the first ten years of its operation."
One per 700,000 people in the USA works out to about 430 of them. So, about
3% of what I was hoping for, but you have to start somewhere. :-) Still, I
can wonder, if that's all we have ten years from now, well, it might be kind
of too late to help a lot with an economic transition... But, it's progress,
so maybe everyone would get so excited about those once they saw even a few
more public FabLabs in action that support for expansion would snowball...
Anyway, I just sent a note to my representative asking him to cosponsor it.
John Griessen
> Thanks for the interesting news:
> "H.R.6003 -- National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010 (Introduced in House - IH) by Rep. Bill Foster [D-IL14]"
> http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:h6003:
> "(3) to seek to establish at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its
> operation."
>
> One per 700,000 people in the USA works out to about 430 of them. So, about 3% of what I was hoping for, but you have to start
> somewhere. :-) Still, I can wonder, if that's all we have ten years from now, well, it might be kind of too late to help a lot
> with an economic transition... But, it's progress, so maybe everyone would get so excited about those once they saw even a few
> more public FabLabs in action that support for expansion would snowball...
Growing after it gets some traction is about all we can hope for from the current political situation.
A congressman in the district adjacent to mine holds neighborhood meetings to talk one on one with
10-20 constituents at a go. He did one at a grocery store the other day and was drowned out by
non-physically-violent protesters saying "just say no" to any kind of spending for healthcare...
So, his constituents didn't get to talk with him and he went to his next appt.
John
Paul D. Fernhout
Hard to accept, but possible, that the USA is on such a course that it won't
recover anytime soon (especially when the party of "No" gets back into power
in a few weeks).
Still, the rest of the world is doing exciting things. And there certainly
are a lot of grass roots stuff. Like Bryan just linked to the Open Hardware
Summit ongoing in NYC right now, and there is the Maker Faire at the same
place this weekend. I wish I could go, but beyond it being a several hour
drive, this Saturday I plan to be showing off old tools at my local
historical society harvest festival -- so, our own little local "Maker
Faire" to some extent. :-)
I was involved with the organic agriculture movement in the 1980s (I even
gave a talk to the NJ Department of Agriculture about how to run a
certification program), and it seemed back then like such an uphill slog
(and that was even after years of hard work by others). But a quarter
century later, now we have national standards (such as they are) and
widespread easy access to organic food in many grocery stores. Some of the
spirit of the organic movement got left behind, sadly, like the local
aspects, and the know your farmer aspects, but even with that, there are
some encouraging trends. And overall, it's great to have so much certified
organic food everywhere.
Open manufacturing may well go the same way -- it's small now, and it may
seem like an impossible hope for widespread change, but in twenty years or
so, open manufacturing may be huge. Especially once 3D printers really
proliferate.
GNU/Linux had the same long path too -- twenty-five years or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux