Makerspace Undead

My friend, learning consultant Kyle Brumbaugh, wrote about the hard part of sustaining school makerspaces. Kyle addresses the “soft money” of grants and donations that buy the sexy stuff like 3-D printers and laser cutters, but fall short with the less glamorous maintenance, supplies, and staffing. That latter part is crucial.

Image from ChatGPT

Kyle knows what he’s talking about. He wrote a $500,000 grant to establish the makerspace at the Krause Center for Innovation in Los Altos Hills, California. That same grant included the makerspace coordinator certification program that I took, as part of its first cohort, in 2018.

Successful school makerspaces are islands of enlightenment. But many in the US lack the institutional and philosophical underpinnings necessary to make them effective and sustainable. CREATE lasted 10 years before fading. Oh, the room is still there, but it’s underutilized and its daily light flickered out when I retired this past June.

In my school, I was the center of that institutional passion. While my teachers were busy keeping too many educational “plates” spinning, I maintained the physical space. I presented annual safety briefings, developed, ran, and scheduled activities, stayed plugged into maker ed developments out in the world, etc… In engineering parlance, I was the single point of failure for the entire program.

Computer Science & Engineering Dept. Chair at Pinewood School in Los Altos, Calif., Jonathan Brusco, wrote about makerspaces on LinkedIn, “…programmatically they often fail because administration often thinks that simply having the space is enough. They rarely schedule time, build it into the curriculum, or staff it well.”

The presentation that I give to educators about makerspaces is called “Elementary Makerspaces: Why and How (In that order.)” The “why” is by far the most important part. If a school’s staff does not sincerely buy into the philosophy of maker ed, the space has no reason to live. Understanding and executing at the nexus of learning and making is what makes a school makerspace relevant.

For many school administrators, makerspaces are the next shiny thing to implement on their campuses. Rather than starting with the Constructivism philosophy of Piaget and the Constructionism philosophy of Seymour Papert, they superficially emulate programs that they have seen elsewhere—an admin version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” For them, it’s all about the physical space and its hardware. Often, students use it only for teacher-directed “recipe” projects in which they use commercial kits of identical components to make identical artifacts, rather than using their imaginations to work through self-directed learning journeys that result in durable and internalized learning.

Without that enduring driving philosophy, a school makerspace can appear vibrant and useful, but it is really the educational version of The Walking Dead—its participants accomplishing little more than prescriptive arts and crafts. Self-examination is necessary before starting a makerspace. Know your “why” and your "who" above everything. The hows, the wheres and the whats will come. 

Every Makerspace Runs on Soft Money — Here's What That Actually Costs

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/every-makerspace-runs-soft-money-heres-what-actually-costs-brumbaugh-gwykf/

Plate spinning routine

https://youtu.be/k44uoVm0lPI?si=anUf8_J0y_EkA0t5

Makerspace Coordinator Certificate

https://regionalcte.org/browse/Z2b9Z

Piaget's Theory of Constructivism

https://www.teach-nology.com/currenttrends/constructivism/piaget/

Situating Constructionism

https://web.media.mit.edu/~calla/web_comunidad/Reading-En/situating_constructionism.pdf

Zombies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie

My AI "Line"

I found my AI “line.” I really don’t care if the information that I read was constructed with generative AI. As long as it’s accurate and engaging, it’s fine with me. But it does bother me when I’m reading something that is presented as the authorship of an individual. When some person positions their content as coming “from“ them, that’s when I expect the words, phrases, and choice of language to be theirs alone. If I discover that it is not, I feel betrayed.

From Google Gemini

When I follow an author or columnist, it is a type of personal relationship. I’ve given that author my intellectual and personal trust. I’ve certainly given them my time. When AI is done badly and obviously, I feel like the “author” was trying to con me. They make themselves look foolish and whatever their message might have been is lost. My relationship with them is over and it sure as hell was them, not me.

The choice of words, phrases, and verbal craftsmanship imply personal qualities that should be genuine.

How would you feel if you were a fan of Stephen King only to find out that his work had been ghostwritten by John Grisham? And you don’t even like John Grisham.

If I follow your work and you are using generative AI non-transparently, your betrayal of me is in suspension, pending my discovery of it. Maybe I’ll never find out. But the disingenuousness remains. The qualities that I might admire in you, aren’t even yours.

Not everybody can be Hemingway. But have the confidence in, and respect for, yourself to be transparent about the parts of your offerings that aren’t you.

If you’re going to use AI, be honest about it. But don’t abuse my trust. That’s where I draw the line.