Hello,
I hope you’re well, it’s a fine day here, the sun is low and with the last of the leaves dropping off the trees and a mean chill in the air, it feels as if we’re moving into winter, already.
After last weeks’ madcap mayhem, my ears are still ringing and I keep finding confetti in my pockets, it has been nice to settle back into a routine. I’ve managed a few mornings writing and able to watch a few talks.
It’s quiet in the house at the moment, everyone is out working or at school, although evenings are busy and there are lots of comings and goings. It’s a stark contrast to this time last year when we were hunkered down. There haven’t been as many sunny days either this month and realize that I haven’t cycled for a while. I didn’t manage to get out at all last weekend and I’m badly craving some countryside air and the chance to get my legs moving.
This week seems to be about outcomes and objects. That’s how it is.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
I’ve reflected on this a few times, that when you’re designing constructivist courses with a final project, there comes a moment when you just need to get the students to the end, and the delivery piece has pretty much concluded. I think of this often as a transition from teacher to consultant, you’re there to offer advice, answer questions and provide encouragement. I’ve found that I can usually leave more some more nuanced topics until the end, so we’re looking less at practical skills and frameworks that support the project, but perhaps more theoretical or philosophical aspects that the students might start to encounter as they complete their builds and finalize designs. It’s a chance to deconstruct or think critically about some of the concepts that we’ve been looking at. It’s useful to keep questioning, and make sure ideas don’t become entrenched or that we miss alternative perspectives.
This week, for example, we’ve been looking at the relationship between making and social justice and how makerspaces have worked in marginalized and underrepresented communities. We talked about an article in the Atlantic that pushes back against some in the maker movement that fetishize making so that we value a made object much more than something that isn’t seen, for instance, critical thinking, teaching, or taking care of others. We asked “what if you don’t “make” anything, is that bad?” No, absolutely not.
That’s why it’s important that the making process shouldn’t obsess on product and why conversation, exploration, working together, experimentation, and play are the more important aspects to focus on. This approach was on show at MuseumLab but it’s a hard to impress upon students, who most definitely want to see something visible by the end of their course. So we looked at a few groups who seek equity and center the development of new literacies and incorporate culture and identity in their work. In the UK as elsewhere, the image of a typical maker is quite often of a white male hiding in their shed, away from the world, tinkering and inventing; so it is good to hear about groups such as Double Union or Blackspace, both makerspaces with strong social-justice missions, working for change in their communities.
I have also started to think about ANT (Actor Network Theory) and why we are interested in making. If you start to see the things we make as connectors, constructed and embedded with cultural significance, then it is easy to relate outcomes as conversational pieces. The things we make are important to us, they are imbued with meaning, they are telling us stories. I’m not doing a very good job of explaining here, so here’s a video that you might want to take a look at.
It got me thinking about Fix-it clinics or repair groups, these are places where objects get second-lives. I remember attending a session at the Repair Cafe in Portsmouth, back in the UK, with my kid, who took along a Little Panda Money Box, you know, the one where the paw pops out to grab the coin, for some reason it was getting stuck and the lid wasn’t closing properly. Set up in a room in a community center, there were some more pressing mends than this one, hearing aids, radios, vacuum cleaners which people couldn’t afford to replace or do without.
I’m thinking about this in the same week that apple announced that it will sell DIY repair parts, which only came about because of a little-known lobby group and it really is such an important issue. I doubt that it will make much of a difference in our single-use economy, it pains me just to see the sheer number disposable plates, forks and packaging used in the food industry here in the US, and that’s the tip of the (plastic) iceberg.
Maybe teaching maker skills to students might give them the confidence to repair things? They might be happy taking the casing off their items to give the wires and mechanisms a poke and probably a drop of lubricant. Let’s hope.
Lost and Found
There were a few things that caught my eye this week.
Excellent history of vaccines comic from NPR, including mention of early practices of variolation, which I had no idea about, where pus or scabs taken from one person was placed in a cut of another person. I might object to that particular method, but it’s interesting to think that this is where vaccines might originate from.
Objects might be the film to watch this week (via Kottke)
Huge fan of Otter.ai which has been incredibly useful in language learning, but dismayed that it will be limiting its free plan to 30-minute transcriptions from December 1st.
Tool use and language skills are linked in the brain, so come on - that’s an argument for more hands-on language learning, give your students more to do!
I collected some thoughts about synchronous and asynchronous learning that you can read via Medium.
Life Lessons
I had a email which was full of encouragement but also gave food for thought, saying that they sometimes found the newsletter a little disjointed and scatterbrained, which made me stroke my beard and ponder a little. They’re absolutely right, often ideas aren’t fully formed or lack structure or rigour, and that’s why they’re found here in this newsletter and not online elsewhere or published more formally. I honestly do try to read and re-read what I’ve written. Mostly it is reflective and partly just vocalising some of the thoughts of the week, unpacking them in a few words. Sometimes they are starting points and hope that they are to you too. I do know that it is useful to write in this way, that it is liberating, and although it can be difficult to make sense of ideas, I will return to these posts and find common-threads and they might make some sense, while some issues I know I’ll never read again.
Thank you
The deer spent a week in our garden and managed to avoid the trailcam almost entirely, just a rear-end or the top of its neck. I collected the memory card eager with anticipation but amazed that they’d snuck around the lens. It’s as if they know…
They do like to have a chew on the bush outside the kitchen window though, so at least I caught them there.
Anyway, next week is the traditional Thanksgiving break, we’re going to head out of town for a few nights, we’re looking forward to a change of scene.
I hope you’re well and things are good with you. Drop me a line, let me know your thoughts, it’s the best part of writing a newsletter.
See you next week.