eCROP Blog

The September 21 World MakerFaire in New York had a spectacular Saturday and Sunday. As this posting only hints at its depth, do explore the link above. The Faire included acres of exhibits, booths, multiple stages with speakers and presentations, discounted and free books by presenting authors, circus atmosphere (Tic Toc Croc pedal power rides on the right) crowds, perfect weather and minds expanding with so many ideas, evolutionary combinatorial thinking everywhere. It was a wonderful 'New York state of mind'. We stayed nearby in the Parc Hotel, 3 subways stops away in a wonderful mini- Chinatown neighborhood.

Makerspace asks certain intellectual, social and political questions. It begins very simply. Intellectual If I was not bound by the restrictions of some figure of authority, what might I make? If I could make anything I wanted to make out of any material or combination of materials, colors and textures, what would it be? In the digital age the question easily moves to computer assisted empowerment. If I could design the object at a computer and have it manufactured, what would it be? How would it fit in with the world of non-digital objects? More recently the questions goes further, if this design could include electrical conductivity, perhaps wires, and those wires could connect with other computer chips and some possible combination of an infinite arrays of sensors, power sources and gears and network transmitting capacity, what might it be or do? And Social And then if there is one of these objects and it can communicate, can it communicate with others of its kind? C...

Updated/revised May 30, 2014 The standards driven school & testing monopoly is a systemic model for education within which school teachers must work and children must attend that veers towards obsolete, unethical, unprofessional and illegal. The Net and makerspace are modeling interesting alternatives. These are  tall claims and hypotheses whose evidence is worth exploring. Obsolete There are so many ways to say that a system or design needs replacing: antiquated, out of date, outmoded, outworn, old, stale, behind the times, old-fashioned, anachronistic, old-fangled, antique, antediluvian, passé, démodé. Tony Wagner, Harvard Innovation Education Fellow says "The system has become obsolete". Wagner analyzed the nature of education's obsolescence in his books Global Achievement Gap (2010) and Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World  (2012). They beg the question as to what is making the current education system obsolete, a thoug...

An emerging trend might be tagged as Social-multimedia-threaded-communication (SMTC); this interweaves the deeper ideas of multi-page web sites with the context of the tweet moment; it enables theory/research to dialog with practice, a long standing educational gap. SMTC is a simple expansion of current developments. A tweet, a short comment, has been the mark of a more socially aware voice in educational and community circles. More experienced tweeters find that great starting point often leaves change on the table; their tweets expand the text with an image, a connection to visual thoughts that unpack the tweet further. Further, through hashtags, they connect the reader with other communities that inform the idea(s). Yet though a tweet comment has become an important dimension of 21st communication, it is just one dimension, yet one with great potential to lead to other dimensions, blogs and multipage sites. The idea of Social-multimedia-threaded-communication (SMTC), provides a...

I'll get to cyberspace and the knowledge society, but first a little story. Let's imagine for a moment that you are extracting ore from a gold mine. You are studying some recent reports. The good news You are confronted with a report from the experts (geologists in this case) that the size of your gold mine will grow 40% a year forever, doubling every two years. The amount of the best ore that converts more quickly into gold will increase from 22% to 37% in just the next few years, and will continue to improve ( IDC , 2014). Using your techniques, there is not only a rapidly growing number of other gold mine sites that have high potential, but an astonishing number of other kinds of valuable ores that are appearing as well. There is a high amount of financial capital not currently in use that is interested in financing mine expansion. The bad news The investors need to see a higher level of actual gold (profit) before they will invest. Though you are highly automa...

The Burlington MakerFaire is scheduled for Saturday, April 12, 2014. They requested that Twitter and social networks work with the hashtag of #BMMF for sharing tweets related to this event. Ideas that emerge from those tweets and my own photos will appear later in this blog posting. Tweet on! Sneak preview video below. And use the comment box below to chime in with observations and ideas. Ben Harris is the founder of the Burlington MakerFaire. His question for Steve Wozniak as Elon University's 2013 Fall Convocation notes the educational interests of the Alamance Maker Guild . This videoclip will require some patience with the audio echo. The makerfaire movement helps answer an interesting question. Is the makerspace movement a passing fad or the revenge of progressive education  (Paulo Blikstein, Feb. 3, 2014)?

"We learn by doing" Aristotle "To understand is to invent" Piaget "Constructing solidifies learning" Papert Invent to learn" Martinez & Stager "The Makerspace in the library is an  oasis for student self-directed learning . It serves as a  rejuvenation center for inspiring love of both formal and informal learning . In my opinion, a space like this should be a priority for all schools in the twenty-first century; and you do not have to break the bank to create one."  Eric Sheninger , award-winning Principal at New Milford High School, Bergen County, NJ. Maker Schools and Makerspace For over 30 years the personal computer revolution has expanded cyberspace into our homes, businesses, government, the globe and our pockets and purses and ever so glacially slow into 1 to 1 computer-to-student-technology for our public school classrooms. Meanwhile, technology races on ahead, transforming and giving rebirth to long dormant ideas...

As schools move rapidly towards widespread rollout of 1:1 computer per student systems, educators and culture also stands at the cross-roads for critical decisions about the kinds of software and learning methodologies to be used. Following the money will indicate what choices are being made, as a great deal of it is going to change hands in going forward. Will instruction be authoritarian, top-down state competency, teacher centered instruction delivered to students as containers for holding and repeating information and directions using CMI/ILS/LMS software? Will it be democratic, bottom-up student-interest centered, envisioning students as generators, composing with the rich interactive multimedia of the age, learners as eduentrepreneurs of inventive solutions to interesting problems and participants whose independence and teamwork grow globally by constructing their own personal learning networks and learning products?   Might it be blended? To what degree? How did we get to ...

There are certain facts and questions that would be useful to serve as foundation for curriculum planning. New ones have emerged since I wrote, The Long View – Curriculum into the 21st Century , for the NC Middle School Journal (2014). In short, the adult world is awash in the "new oil", digital information, the product of the silent, invisible and endlessly expanding information explosion; information dominates all other forms of capital, and the economy and culture use digital technology to build new businesses and new careers on it every day.    Over 80% of the population in the United States uses the Net and the Web every day if not through most of its hours.  Such a rapidly changing culture requires inquisitive, question-seeking, self-actualizing edupreneurs. To survive let alone thrive in such a current setting requires a learner centered, student centered educational system that graduates everyone with such skills. Such thinking has long been central to stated...

Finance builds, schools starve – stupid equation.   50 characters Finance builds, schools starve – stupid fixable equation. How many ways can we Tweet this? 88 characters Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; growth’s nub, public schools, begs napkins.    118 characters Fix! Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; our key growth lever, the public school, begs to eat napkins.   140 characters The Truth There are simple new truths we must comprehend about the divergent nature of the global digital buffet table. The current richness and depth of the World Wide Web is built on a little bit extra. The extra capacity of people’s homes, the garage, enabled individual creativity that led to personal computers;  the extra capacity of people, government’s capital, taxes, founded the Internet and the Web. The extra capacity of people's time plus digital devices and the We...