So, I have a follow up to my last post about my foray into Making. Let’s return to the scene when I had gone back to the site of the first workshop I had fled, where I eventually tried my hand at Scratch and the cute, little Bee Bot. I previously mentioned that I spent some time just tinkering with the Bee Bot. I didn’t see any directions, but jumped in anyway and tried to figure it out. I did get some “peer to peer” mentoring from someone else who stopped by while I was exploring, and I was quite content to just play with figuring out how to program it to take different paths. It is a fairly simple robot, as far as robots go. It has four arrows on its’ back, in the four cardinal directions, with a “go” button in the center of those. From searching the internet, I found out that there are two more buttons, “clear” and “pause”, however, on the one I was using, those words were rubbed off, or it was an older version that had some other symbols instead of the words that were not intuitive to me. To program it, you touch an arrow the number of times you want it to go in that direction, building a sequence, and then press “go”.

There I was, on the floor, by myself, fairly happily trying to make it go in different directions and different shapes. In one of these iterations, I had it turn left and travel off the mat on which it normally runs, as I was working towards having it go in a square shape. At this point, one of the facilitators/presenters for the session walked by and noticed what I was doing. I am sure she had the best intentions of giving me more technical language about what I was doing when she commented “looks like you have a syntax error”, but the effect was to make me feel incompetent. It is pretty pathetic. I am a 46 year old woman, almost finished with my PhD, who has raised two amazing young women to adulthood, and taught elementary and middle school students for over a decade. I am a competent, relatively bright, and accomplished human being! However, I immediately shut down when someone told me, in a way that made me feel “dumb” that I had made an error with an educational toy designed for young children. So, once again, I packed up my belongings and left the room.

It has been interesting to reflect on my reaction. From the first, I felt vulnerable and uncomfortable with so many activities and materials in the room with which I was unfamiliar and inexperienced. Lame as it may sound, it did take an act of courage for me to come back and finally sit down and try some of these things by myself, not just watching others. And, I tried not just one, or two, but three new things that day. Yet, at the first sign of perceived judgment about my “failure” I felt terrible and left. I didn’t react that way when my “near peer” sat and offered suggestions to help me figure out how to “clear” the programs to make a new one, but when it was someone who was in more of a position of authority, I was shut down.

Lest you worry that it curbed my adventurousness, the universe generously offered me yet another Maker experience that day, creating the functional chair out of cardboard. This time, I didn’t even try to resist and claim the offered role of observer. Instead, I just laughed and accepted my fate and went and gathered materials.

I hope I remember the deeper lesson I learned that day – even when I am giving what I think might be helpful language or advice, if a learner does not want it, I might do more harm than good. And when someone is at the edge of their own boundaries, even if it might just be baby steps into something new, that is a vulnerable place and they need extra space and support. Lastly, even grownups, who are competent in lots of other ways, can be insecure learners in that space of trying something for the first time too.

Since I am interested in the Maker Movement, I have been focusing on the “DIY, Maker, Hacker” strand at the SXSWedu 2015 conference. It is exciting to see so many innovative programs and projects happening all around the country, and around the world. However, today I came face to face with one of my own hypocrisies. While I have been involved with this movement for the last four years, presenting on the topic at conferences, even being a Maker at the MakerFaire in San Mateo two years in a row, as well as local mini-MakerFaires, I tend to avoid a whole slew of Making experiences. I do describe myself as a crafter, I have been knitting at most sessions I attended this week. However, I have yet to solder anything, connect any circuits, or program even simple projects. But the fates were conspiring against me today. My first glimpse of this was the session, “Maker Mash-up”, where the tables were full of a variety of hands-on projects. After the twenty minute intro, we were invited to explore. I watched someone try to figure out Makey-Makey for a few minutes, and then made my escape.

Fortunately there was another talk from this strand right next door called “DIY Tech: Creativity Through Transformed Teaching”. It sounded safe. Yet, after about twenty minutes in this session they asked us to make a musical instrument using a plastic cup, paper clip, and length of jewellery wire. There were some parameters, but not knowing much about music, I wasn’t sure what they meant, but since I had already run away from one session, I figured I might as well give this one a go. So, I made something that produced a song. I was feeling pretty good about that until we got the next assignment to choose a song from a list and play it using our instrument in front of the group. At that point, I made for the door again.

I peeked back into my first room and as the numbers had lessened, I felt a bit more courage and thought that I should really get over my resistance and try something new. I went to an empty table that had an iPad with Scratch Jr. loaded. Since this program is designed for 5-7 year olds, it felt like a safe place to start. I did play around with it for ten or so minutes until I understood most of what it is capable of, and then progressed on to the Makey-Makey Scratch spot. I didn’t really know what I was doing with the Makey-Makey part, but I was emboldened to play with the Scratch program a bit, and made some more progress. Since there was still time left, I thought I would give one more tool a try and messed around with a programmable robot bee shaped thing. It was cute, and through trial and error I discovered a few things. Once someone else showed me how to “reset”, I even had some fun with it.

Then it was time for my next session, “Exploring Environments for Maker-Centered Learning”. After an intro to the speakers and their work, we were given the challenge to build a functional chair out of cardboard and brads. Each group was to have a few “doers” and a few “observers”. When we went around the group to say what role we wanted, I admitted that I tend to prefer the observer role in these types of activities, but that today it seemed the universe wanted me to engage in some “doing”, do I helped build the chair. And, it was fun. I enjoyed the teamwork and the way we easily negotiated the design and the roles –and at the end of twenty (!) minutes, we did have a chair that could support weight. While it was more of a stool than a chair- we met the parameters of the challenge.

Furthermore, I had met the challenge for me- to break out of my comfort zone and do some making! Watch out- you might soon see me with a soldering iron in my hand and then there will be no stopping me!

As a Maker who doesn’t really Make much, it is probably no surprise that as an educator who never really used technology, I would spend five days at the recent International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) annual conference in Atlanta. As a result, I have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about the role of technology in the classroom and learning. I took a class through OSU last year that focused on technology in the classroom (interestingly an on-line class, but that is a topic for another day) and it was my first exposure to the variety of what teachers are doing with technology these days. My classmates represented the whole range of individuals teaching K-20+ and the different projects they shared encompassed an amazing variety of programs and topics. So, being surrounded by 14,000 educators, administrators, and technology specialists was not the complete culture shock it might have been a few years earlier. And, if nothing else, my fellow attendees are very excited about what they are doing. I have rarely been around so many enthusiastic, eager people who truly believe that what they are doing can change education for the better- they just oozed positivity!

Prior to my PhD journey, I was involved with Montessori for over twenty years. As I have previously written about some of the reasons I whole-heartedly agree with the Montessori pedagogy, hands-on, interest driven, collaborative, follow the child and such, I won’t belabor that here. However, my long experience with Montessori shapes my experiences with and attitudes about technology and education. Let’s just say that Montessori has not been quick to embrace technology. Montessori tends to be conservative anyway- it can happen when a movement grows around an individual and once that individual dies, it can be hard to determine how to incorporate new things/ideas in a way that preserves the original intention. What would Maria Montessori do? We can only make our best guesses. Some would argue that because she was a scientist by training, she would be interested in some of the new possibilities technology offers. However, as modern Montessorians strive to preserve what makes this pedagogy effective, new ideas and tools are subject to much scrutiny, if they are considered at all.

One misconception that others can have is around the “hands-on”’ nature of Montessori. One woman I talked to at the conference had a PhD in mathematics and had created some clever ways of modeling mathematical ideas on computers. She was surprised that Montessorians would not necessarily appreciate her programs as she saw them as “concrete” representations of abstract ideas- which is what many Montessori materials are designed to do. And for years there have been computer games (now aps) that allow children to “move” beads and other images around to represent Montessori math materials for work with the four operations (+.-.x./). Yet, most Montessorians would argue that it is important for the child to hold an actual bead bar, with three beads, or nine beads, on it and manipulate it, feel it, count it, notice the difference in weight and space it takes up. Does sliding an image around on a computer screen with your index finger really recreate that experience? And if we forego teaching handwriting and start children out with keyboarding at younger and younger ages, will that somehow affect human intelligence as we know it? The human brain and hand have coevolved in ways we don’t fully understand and there is some evidence that written language parallels other changes in our development as a species. Montessori believed in the importance of “work with the hand” for everything from intellectual to emotional and social growth, at all levels of development- preschool through adolescence. Will technology fundamentally change how we think and learn?

I don’t claim to know the answers, but I am concerned. I think that is why Make appeals to me. Yes, it does have a technology component, but the focus is on individuals being producers, not just consumers of technology. There are plenty of people at ISTE who also believe this, advocating for teaching coding and ap design to all grade levels. But, I am concerned what happens when we let this dominate their day. I heard Dale Doughtery (co-founder of Make and founder of MakerFaire) answer a question from a kindergarten teacher about how to create a MakerSpace in his classroom. Dale said that for this age, finger painting, sewing, playing with blocks and clay is Making. He even said that “Montessori had it right, children need to be working with their hands, with real materials” (and yes, I did do an internal fist pump when I heard this!).

I think there is a need for balance and that there is room for both. I realize we live in a world that is overrun with technology, and this is part of the reality of children and youth today, and I want them to be prepared for the world they inhabit. Yet, I want them to build real towers that they can measure their own height against and that can topple over and they hear the crash. I want them to know the difference, in their bodies, between a unit, a ten, a hundred, and a thousand.

I will end with a quote I saw on FaceBook this week (just to add my own bit of irony, I guess!). “Yes, kids love technology, but they also love Legos, scented markers, handstands, books, and mud puddles. It’s all about balance.” K.G. first grade teacher. It is all about balance- let’s all remember that!

 

After a day-long cascade of productivity, Laura completed her Ph.D. proposal this afternoon. I called her and Shawn aside for a photo (above) to celebrate the milestone. Way to go, Laura!

It’s time to do annual reporting for Oregon Sea Grant. This gives us an opportunity to hold up our impacts and say “we did this.” In other ways, it’s about as much fun as it sounds.

Speaking of fun, here’s a really quick and easy  science activity from Make: Projects. With a mason jar, some rubbing alcohol, a flashlight, a disc of dry ice and a towel, you can make a cloud chamber to observe cosmic rays in real time. You can also make a bigger, fancier one with a basketball case. Then you let the universe do its thing, for the most part. You can trust the universe.  It’s been facilitating free-choice learning activities for a while.