Engaging Community and the Next Generation of Makers, Presented by Dale Dougherty
emiko introduces Dale Dougherty
“How do we attract people from outside of our bubble? Because it is easy to be in the studio and forget all about the outside world”
“This Maker Faire just blew my mind. it’s set in the suburbs in San Mateo, and thousands of people come out for it. By now it’s maybe 90,000 people and still still growing!” “The key for us to survive in the field is by including them into our field and getting kids excited about making things again”
“He was co-founder with Tim Reilly for the O’Reilly Media Incorporated” “He is the maker of this Maker Faire”
“What’s really exciting is that last week, Dale was invited to the Whitehouse as a ‘Champion of Change’”
“We need that next generation to be working with their hands and to be thinking in creative ways”
Dale:
“Good afternoon everybody! How’re you doing today?”
“Industrial arts has basically disappeared from the educational landscape” “I wanted to talk about that” “My vision for Maker Faire is that it’s a learning event, a place for people to be exposed to the makers and the way of doing things”
“This is our local high school, and this used to be their tech room / shop room. The teacher passed away two years ago, and they never hired anyone to replace him. They just took all that equipment and pushed it all into the back and, converted it into a regular classroom”
“ITE programs have declined over a third in the last 10 years”
“Both the number and quality of the programs available has declined significantly”
“At least it was an alternative. It was there for someone who said ‘I want to do something diffferent’”
“And I don’t know if you can read this, but this is ‘Proper Care and Use of a Microscope” It talks about using a microscope and shows you all of the steps on having to use it, assuming that you’ve never used one. This is on a quiz”
“We take those that get the answer right and say ‘You’re stars!’ and those that don’t ‘there’s something wrong with your’. And that’s wrong”
“So I think we’re living in a time wherein there’s a great opportunity to create new ways of thinking and open participation” (Play & experimentation, Open Participation, Democratization of Technology)
“I think of You as knowing things, of doing things in our community that really matter”
“An intelligence is the ability to solve problems, or to create products that are valued in one or more cultural settings” – Howard Gardner
“Feew of us think of ourselves as inventors” “To learn is to invent, is to make connections between things. To make these relationships that didn’t exist for us”
Dale shows a Maker Faire video about making robots from old typewriters
“Lead the child to construct for himself the tools that will transform him from the inside – that is, in a real sense, and not just on the surface.” – Piaget
“To understand is to invent”
“To transform yourself, that’s what I think is possible here. I don’t mean from something bad to something good, just that life is that process of transformation from one thing to the next”
He shows a video here of children playing with electronic maker’s space on the museum floor at the exploratorium
“Isn’t that beautiful, to see kids and adults mixing together, interacting?”
“I think we’re seeing authentic learning there, real learning there. What’s important to me there is that everyone is learning, not just kids”
Cultivating the experimental mind:
“to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by discovery”
“an experiment not carried out by the individual himself with all the freedom of initiative is by definition not an experiment but a mere drill without educational value”
“Making creates evidence of learning”
“I think there’s really something important in the act of making” “It’s something you share with others and you talk about it in interesting ways”
“That badge is something that means something to him, that he can share with others” on a boy at the Detroit Maker Faire soldering a badge
“I wanted to focus on what people were playing with, rather than just what they were producing” “I wanted it to be fun”
“In some ways there’s a tradition here that I wanted to connect to, and that is Tinkering. Of figuring things out because you wanted to do that, you wanted to learn that”
He talks about learning from magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated
“What I learned through all of this is that people really love making projects, of being involved in making something”
“The hackers are sort of a new group”
“{He} had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?” – Steven Levy’s Hackers
“Today we use that term (get your hands on), to mean grasping it, getting a sense of control.”
“I just loved going down to the Homebrew Computer Club, showing off my ideas and designing neat computers. I was willing to do that for free for the rest of my life.” – Steve Jobs
“They needed to know that there were other people like them out there”
“Makers are Playing with technology” “It’s really how we present this to kids, as play, that opens it up to them to participate and learn in a new way”
“I mentioned democratizing computer technology and how it’s changing things”
Here he talks about 3d printers such as the Makerbot and others
“So there’s another thing in education that I think of as the garage band social pattern. And it’s one of those ways that we learn that’s really interesting.” “there’s not formal education requirement, you can start on your own” “The idea of practicing, of playing together”
“You’re artists, when you take that first step to show your work in public, that’s a big risk! But you learn a heck of a lot out of it!”
“So this is Maker Faire. We just finished our 6th Maker Faire in the San Mateo area”
“I wanted to do Detroit, because people sort of ascribe it as this Bay Area thing. But I thought, hey, we could do this in Detroit” “there are creative people there. There’s a 100 year history of industry there” “This creative work is in every community”
“I had some people show up from Kuwait yesterday and they want this sort of thing for Kuwait. Why? Because most of the people in Kuwait are employed by the government. They want to promote this sort of way of learning”
“No boring stuff, I like that!” from the Maker Faire video
“I just want to end with this, it’s from HowToons” “I work with my hands and my mind. I pursue beauty in what I produce. I see art in science and science in art. I value skills”
Question from the audience: “Are you taking this to local elementary schools and helping them start programs and create kits where the parents can come in and do this sort of exploratory hands on work?”
Dale: “I’m actually in the process of starting up a foundation to handle some of this sort of thing that I really endorse and believe in.” “I started a project with our local high school called Project Make” “I’m interested in all of these levels… it’s a big challenge!” “Most of it and the way the Maker Movements is DIY is getting more people involved” “We just sort of help share the recipe for them if they want to do it” “We have a young makers program which will also start in January, to start small clubs”
Question from the audience: “Where do the people who are demonstrating find the amount of materials they would need to start a project, to do an activity?”
Dale: “We try to work with them on it” “We have an open application policy and ask you to tell us what you need and sometimes we’re able to help with that sort of thing” “We try to work with you and see if there’s a way we can contribute to a budget for tools and that sort of thing”
Question from the audience: “I just wanted to thank you for featuring Detroit as one of your cities for this. My question is a funny one and maybe a little simple one: why do you have the e at the end of Faire”
Dale: “From the get-go, we wanted to do a family oriented event. We wanted people to show up and to have fun” “Today we don’t have the same sorts of faires that they used to” “The verb ‘to make’ in French is Faire” “I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s a nice coincidence”
“On your point about Detroit: I’m not from there, but I went there and I got a feel for it and wanted to be a part of it”
Question from the audience: “What kind of barricades have you come across in trying to set these up in various places?”
Dale: “Actually, you know, it’s a really interesting question. We’ve done Maker Faire in Austin, Tx and Detroit and it’s really community organizing in some places. “ “what’s kind of interesting is that they kind of don’t know each other” (with regards to different kinds of makers) “Basically we’re all Makers” “Seeing how we are all part of something much bigger is really important” “The creative people sort of get this, it’s more when you go up against some of the corporate or educational” “My worry is that someone could take a great project and put it in front of kids and say DO IT THIS WAY and really take away from the excitement of that” “Helping kids match up with the resources is really important” “What’s happening here is exposing kids to this while their parents are around really exposes them to the idea that this is something their kids enjoy”
Question from the audience: “What would the impact be in having something along the lines of a Maker Faire tent over at Occupy Oakland and how it might be translated into something of a larger social nature”
Dale: “We’ve had some of the locals come up and try and get something started up there” “there’s something happening on a cultural level that I’m not sure I can completely articulate, which comes down to this idea that we really want to limit our influence from these institutions” “There’s a sense of moving from being powerless to doing something about it” “We are trying to make change” “We’re trying to do something that’s positive”
“Thank you all for coming today, and I really appreciate it!”
