"Today was a big day in my grade 4-5 STEM class: It was our first time to start the “Maker Studio” rotation. Maker Studio is a concept I developed this past summer attending Maker Faire Kansas City and the awesome “Create, Make and Learn” week-long #MakerEd #STEM summer institute in Vermont coordinated by Lucie deLaBruere (@techsavvygirl). Last year was my 17th as an educator but my first as an elementary STEM teacher. I enjoyed developing and sharing lessons about a wide variety of topics, but as a “STEM teacher” was uncomfortable with my predominant focus on direct instruction lessons. Some of my favorite units from last year focused on the science and technology of music and sound, kitchen chemistry, and collaborative projects in MinecraftEDU involving permiter/area building challenges, coordinate grid scavenger hunts, and more. Our projects and activities together in these units were engaging, fun, and standards-based, but still relied predominantly on direct instruction. The after-school “Makers Club” I facilitated provided many opportunities for student-directed learning, but didn’t change my predominant teacher-directed instruction during STEM class. My summer PD experiences at #MakerFaireKC and #CML14 were transformative. Enter “Maker Studio.”"
Via
John Evans,
Timo Ilomäki
[T]he vast majority of such MOOC registrants never make it past the first week and only about 10% end up finishing the course. What is thus truly unknown, and what we must figure out, is how we come to think about and enact community engagement both within and against the coming online transformation.
This is the state of community engagement in the disrupted university. It is a precipitous moment where traditional models and norms no longer apply so easily or thoroughly. In some cases, there are immense opportunities to be gained as faculty discover how to make their work public and bring the public into their work. In other cases, there are immense opportunities to be lost as marginalized populations and communities become ever more disenfranchised from the institutions just blocks away, yet gigabytes apart.