Maker Competencies

U T A with star in the center, used when staff photo is unavailable

by Martin Wallace
March 14 2016

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One of the things that my team is tasked with developing is a set of maker-based competencies that can be mapped to course learning outcomes. Since I have little experience in making, but a lot of experience with the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, I've decided to try to come up with something along those lines... something I'll temporarily call Maker Literacy Competency Standards.

Today I tried re-writing the Information Literacy Standards to create some rudimentary draft of maker literacy competency standards, and found that it just doesn’t work as hoped. Some of IL standards could be easily re-written simply by replacing "the information literate student..." with "the maker literate student...". For example, "The information literate student defines and articulates the need for information" readily becomes "The maker literate student defines and articulates the need to make." Others became senseless, were completely irrelevant, or would drive me into a rabbit hole with various connecting corridors of possibilities—it became too confusing. I inevitably began seeing maker literacy as a subset of information literacy rather than a thing on its own. I suppose that in my role as a librarian everything seems like a subset of IL! After having conducted this exercise I kinda feel like I should have known it wasn't going to work out, but at least it was a start.

It's clear to me that this isn't going to be easy, but I'll continue forth and post updates here as I come up with things. I challenge others to read the IL standards and see if they can come up with appropriate mappings to your own ideas/perceptions of what maker-based competencies would look like and post in the comments.

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