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...

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...