Teaching And Learning In Makerspaces: A Challenge

In response I received the following [edited for grammar and brevity]:

What are they teaching and what is being learned?

What subjects are these makers teaching? If they are teaching electronics and programming do they have an actual education in that field or can they show related experience?  Can they demonstrate their skills by sharing their [open source] projects along with videos?  Can they show the results of what their students have achieved?  [Can students] share their [open source] projects and demonstrate that they can explain how it actually works?

How does a person look at a project and determine the level of skill and knowledge it takes to produce that project when one lacks involvement in the project or doesn't even have the basics to grasp the complexity of it?

I’m not certain that this response was meant to be rhetorical—at face value it seems to be. But I also see a good set of questions that the Task Force members should be asking themselves.

After re-reading the questions I recognized that these are all things we hope to get some insight into in our research… I don’t think the questioner intended that but it’s worth pointing out. I know (or, I’m pretty sure) that these questions are rhetorical, and we assume we know the answers to them. But, we have to do the hard work of finding evidence for those assumptions. Once we have some evidence-backed hypothesis about “how makers teach and learn” then we can begin to formalize that process through curriculum design, which is basically the goal of my task force, not to mention the basis for my job.

So, it may turn out that our assumptions are correct and we need to involve highly-skilled, highly-trained “teachers” to teach this stuff, or we may find that students learn better from their own peers, or even a YouTube video. Both models hold some weight. Both will have their use in different situations. You can probably learn very well from a YouTube video on soldering, if you have the motivation to do so. But it’s doubtful that you could learn to weld without an experienced welder standing at your side and guiding you through the process (Have you ever worn a welder’s shield? You wouldn’t be able to see a YouTube video though one of those!)

The easy answer to “What are they teaching and what is being learned?” is “everything.” However the Task Force is not interested so much in the “What” but in the “How” so that we can identify what methods of teaching/instructing work best in a specific situation. I don’t have a good answer for the “How” just yet. The Task Force is doing a lot of research and discovery on the topic of “how makers teach and learn.” Once we have accumulated enough data, we’ll be able to report on what we’ve learned about it.