eCROP Blog

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books:  An Alphabetical Beginning See the Foundational Works of the Maker Movement for date ordered commentary on this list. Aliverti, Paolo, Andrea Maietta, and Patrick Di Justo.  The Maker's Manual: A Practical Guide to the New Industrial Revolution . Maker Media, Inc., 2015. no reviews. Important related article Browder, R. E., Aldrich, H. E., & Bradley, S. W. (2016).  Entrepreneurship Research, Makers, and the Maker Movement . Working Paper. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Browder/publication/312609426_Entrepreneurship_Research_Makers_and_the_Maker_Movement/links/588656e492851c21ff4d5ae6/Entrepreneurship-Research-Makers-and-the-Maker-Movement.pdf Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, 350 BCE. Ross translation (1908). Classics MIT. http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/aristotle/ethics.pdf Anderson , Chris.  Makers: The new industrial revolution . New York: Crown Business, 2012. Review:  https://m.hu...

8 Updates, last on December 12, 2017 Perhaps due to its long history of pioneering across a continental wide wilderness, America has always had a significant streak of the self-reliant, do-it-yourself (DIY) and entrepreneurial spirit. But just when the regimented factory life of the 20th century or the " digital cave" life of many or the smorgasbord of pre-made products appeared to be extinguishing that DIY streak, a counter-movement emerged.  It began with small flickering flames representing those makers who are regular inhabitants of hardware, electronic parts and textile stores. That in turn led to a recent national and global rebirth in the concept of personal making. This has been further driven by a dramatic drop in the cost and capabilities of the technologies for making, composing, communicating, sharing, distributing and marketing things and ideas. But I wonder if it is not equally driven by a significantly repressed primordial instinct for a unique aspect of bei...

Finland's wrestling match over going digital in the classroom is a critical struggle by a world leading educational system. As Doyle (2016) notes: "Finland has launched an expensive, high-risk national push toward universal digitalization and tabletization of childhood education that has little basis in evidence and flies in the face of a recent major OECD study that found very little academic benefit for school children from most classroom technology" ( http://hechingerreport.org/how-finland-broke-every-rule-and-created-a-top-school-system/ ). Finland's schools have no reason to fear the digital age. There was a time as digitalization roared into U.S. work force in 1987 in which the economist Robert Solow famously observed: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Yet, even by 2011 the Internet as a sector at 3.4% of GDP was more significant to the economy in the United States than agriculture or energy ( http://www.mckinsey.co...