The Calendar is 12 Pages Again
As the Earth makes another loop around the sun, I become even more reflective. The month of December contained some interesting books that I wanted to draw on for this month's blog post.
But first we are changing things up in the structure of the Foundry Makerspace Blog. We’ve switched to a Weekly Publishing Schedule that occurs on every Friday. My posts will appear the First Friday of every month.
In light of this change, I am going to reorder my approach to my posts. I will be moving the content of the STEAM Making updates within schools (John Harris Campus and SciTech Campus) to the beginning of the blog. This allows for a quicker review of what is happening in the schools. Over the past year and a half, I know it has been sometimes painful to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see updates and photos. I’ll still provide my commentary on my experience as a Fellow and connecting it to the work I do in research, thinking, and making within all of Harrisburg.
Here’s to a New Year full of growth. What will you be doing with your next 52 weeks?
STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School
SCIENCE:
Trout in the Classroom (Sunada Roberts)
While the beginnings of the TIC Program were successful, amongst the equipment issues and the shipping of over 550 trout eggs, the month of December brings sad news. Going into the holiday break on 12/18/17 I saw that we only had 3 of the 210 fish that were brought over from Downey Elementary School.
TECHNOLOGY:
SciBOTS Robotics Team (Robert Steps)
As the Holiday Break approached the students participating in the SciBots Robotics Club focused on driving. The 9th grade students worked on teamwork in picking up glyphs and stacking them in the 4x4 bins. They found that this was more difficult and warranted some changes to the grippers. I helped work the edits to the 3D prints. We had an issue of filament jam with the XYZ Da Vinci 1.0 printer that finally was resolved the final week before the break. I helped to produce some of the 3D lettering that the students wanted for their bot by printing on our DeltaPrintr Go.
Now that 2018 is here, there are two opportunities to get into the State Championship on Saturday, Feb 24th. The first is at the Oxford Regional Qualifying Tournament on Saturday, January 6th. The second is at Penn State York Regional Qualifying Tournament on Saturday, January 27st.
ART:
AV Studio (George Elo)
Mr. Elo is continuing to work out the issues within the equipment he is using for the AV Broadcasting studio. There is an audio lag found with the Elgato HD Capture Device. He is working with AV Technicians in the district to start an ongoing broadcast.
ART:
Podcasting (George Elo)
In November, Mr. Elo helped students get started in Podcasting, which he saw was an entrance into broadcasting. He has setup a Podcasting station in the AV Studio so that students could practice their speaking and editing skills. They are using Audacity and multiple USB mics to record. They are also using Virtual Audio Mixer to help control the mix and JinglePalate as a digital soundboard.. In the future they look to have a podcast featuring Foundry Makerspace fellows as well as eSports. The eSports is especially interesting because of the Fall 2017 announcement of Harrisburg University Varsity eSports Team and the HU 15 Full Ride Scholarships in eSports.
MATHEMATICS:
MIT App Inventor (Traci Kornfeld)
Starting in February Mrs. Kornfeld will be teaching MIT App Inventor with the help of the SciBot's Community Coach, Jonathan Wheat. This 6 week class is a new initiative to connect coding with the Robotics Team. In the past FIRST Tech Challenge has used block based program and MIT App Inventor to make programing bots a little less complicated. The timing of this effort is ideal because the FTC State Championship happens on and the 2017-2018 season will be complete. Students will be building projects in Module I and Module II on the MIT App Inventor Curriculum Page.
3. Design, Build and Test your Game
STEAM Making @ John Harris Campus High School
TECHNOLOGY:
STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)
During the time between Thanksgiving and the Holiday Break, Mr. Gigac decided to change things up and focus on creating a high quality ePortfolio / Journal (Google Slides Presentation). He did this by having the students watch videos about the Carvey / Easel and then work to create two 6"x6" carvings. Then he took a couple of class periods to go through what we learned together as a group. After this was accomplished, Mr. Gigac moved into the discussion of 3D printing. I helped to provide some background as this was very new to students. We talked about different Manufacturing Processes and again the students watched a couple of videos and proceeded to print objects. This piece of equipment had a higher learning curve because of the setup process and getting a 3D file from a website into Dremel's Proprietary software.
ARTS:
A/V Studio (Mr. Cooper)
Students have been practicing being in front of the camera. What has been a rough start in coordinating the effort, there seems to be some cohesion building. Students are beginning to find their niche based on their interests. One of the most exciting things occurred during the
Making @ Community w/ Foundry Makerspace
On Monday, 1/22/2018, the Foundry will be starting the "Maker Mondays." This will be an ongoing monthly effort to engage the community in the areas of making, STEAM, and community development.
At the Foundry we are taking a broader approach in impacting community by bridging gaps in knowledge and access. We believe that we grow better by learning from each other, operating in the 4Cs - Communicating, Creatively, through the modes of Collaboration and Critical Thinking. We can talk about the necessities of invention, education and entrepreneurship,, but find that modeling it in all that we do to have a greater impact.
I do. You Watch
I do. You Help
You do. I Help. We Talk
You do. I watch. We talk.
You do. Someone else watches
From the Five Steps of Leadership Development
Through the month of December (actually beginning in November) I have Christmas music playing all around my house. I have to apologize to family members, but mentally it is a way for me to keep in the mindset during a time that is usually very hurried. Busyness can become the focus, if one does not reflect on a bigger perspective. I also step back from Social Media and keep focused on what is happening in the 6 feet around me. This is with my family and my community. It is certainly not a perfect process, however, it is something that allows me to soak in the necessary “still small moments” that tend to occur all around us.
Particularly with the listening of music, I no longer listen to NPR, so my connections to local, state, national, and global perspectives are somewhat limited. I make this up through limited connections to news outlets. What is amazing is that I have to learn to turn off my internal reaction of “what did I miss?” when in passing, someone says, “hey did you hear about?’ or “head did you see?” This has already been muted to some extent when our family got rid of full cable in 2008. Because of a job layoff, that year, we had to downsize. It was also the most memorable time during this year because in an act, straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, our family received a Christmas card from our near neighbors, which contained a small sum to help us along during the holidays. This was extremely helpful, because as a growing family (we had our youngest daughter in 2007) and many necessities to balance. To this day, I will not forget this selfless act of community.
This simple act has been on my mind during this December reflection, as I was reviewing Harrisburg’s Comprehensive Plan. I know I talked about some of this during my December blog, Between the 1000 and the 1. On 12/31/17 I submitted my 59 page comments, which I saw was the least I could do as a citizen to acknowledge the level of quality put into the 388 page plan, which cost $200,000, and involved many paid and unpaid work. In my heart I believe that every review of the Comp Plan, contributed to building the necessary state of public engagement, that is so necessary. It was also a way to personally thank those individuals involved who worked 2+ years to consider Harrisburg in the future.
To me that is the crossroads of the holiday - compassion and hope. We definitely need more of these two things in Harrisburg. I am not saying that they are happening, within Harrisburg, but I feel that our mindset is flawed. There seems to be some Toxic Charity, in that what occurs in the city. Many times there are ulterior motives. I'll do something for you if you do something for me. It is easy to classify this as "business/politics as usual." I thing during this time of year especially, we are called to be better than that. This is a very high calling that takes personal transformation. It should also be recognized that this is dynamic because of our human frailties. This December, I had a discussion with another parent about needing to change their child’s holiday mindset of gift giving. From the child’s perspective, it seemed that they have arrived at the age where the learned about manipulation (a curtain being pushed back to peer into adulthood.) They saw that if they could get a gift they really wanted, by giving something someone else really wanted. It is transactional. It removes from relationship to object. Granted I get this from being a parent and being a kid and being excited about the holidays. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel that the ads I heard on Pandora Music embodied this sentiment this year more than other years.
Have we turned everything into a transaction? Is our gratitude solely based on what we receive? In light of this reflection, I started to try and disconnect from the transactions I started seeing. The problem is that when these things turn sinister with the possibility of going down the road of manipulation. Sadly, this happens more often than not in our personal relationships, our work relationships, and even possibly our spiritual relationship to whatever supreme being you might rest. During this holiday, celebrated by a single event of a birth, encapsulating the giving up of everything for a selfless act to save others. This is a really impactful action. It is also these very types of actions that shake us to the core when we see them represented in real life heroes, or as portrayed in cinema (This was recently on my mind as I saw the Pixar movie Coco.
Okay, it should go without explanation, that I am a middle-aged adult, and I fully understand that the world is flawed. I see it every day. We all hope to personally be better and also hope that others become better. This is the basis for New Years Resolutions. I stopped making them years ago, because I see a better process in doing the necessary work in incremental changes as personal struggles arise during the year. I believe we should reflect at the close of a year. I personally find that in “the bleak mid-winter” happens to be a good time for that to occur. It is part of history.
In my work within schools I find that much of the world is transactional and I wonder if we setup students to remain in this mindset for life in the lessons taught. If I do this, I’ll get that. Life becomes an endless “If/Then loop.” It is something mechanical. Expectations are always boiled down to a personal Return On Investment. Be a good economist and understand ROI and incentivization embedded in life. We should really understand what motives or incentivizes us. This is the crux of life? Why do we get out of bed? Reaching a plateau of autodidacticism, is a long process, but I believe a necessity for life-long learning for sustainability. I will probably have to dig into Jacques Rancière’s, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, as I just recently stumbled upon book, while researching my ideas for this blog. I believe there will be some connections to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
This brings me to my main point of my blog this month. What if in a society we begin to devalue education to the point where it is entirely based on transactions? What if we start to see fractures in students not caring to learn or even worse arriving at a point where one is no longer receptive to be taught. I believe these are dangerous places to reside. Both of these elements - to learn & be taught - exist in the realm of education. In light of Will Durant’s quote, if education has no value, then does civilization cease?
During a recent discussion with a Foundry Fellow, we spoke about the difficulty of arriving at “correct value” with objects and services. He explained his experience about seeing a Nepalese artisan go through the process of making a carved wood door in his structure, that was a home/shop/store. I saw this connection to the Comprehensive Plan in the discussion of embodied value of all the existing structures around us, which should be considered “priceless” because they cannot be built in the same manner without an exorbitant amount of cost. This is the issue with art, it has value because of what other attribute to it. I explained that I have talked a lot about the subject with my brother who is a Luthier. Over the past 20 years, he has seen a decrease in guitar repair sales, making it more difficult for him to exist. Individuals no longer want to pay to have items repaired, and repaired correctly. Most of the time, the mindset is to replace old for new. I am finding this through personal experience in the renovation of our home. As we removed plaster and lathe, we discovered “quick easy solutions” that were short term, and not long term. When we are only in the moment, we balance our time and resources accordingly to fit. This isn’t always what is best for the long term, either for us personally, or for others.
I get this as someone who enjoys technology. It pains me to see a “new fruit branded gadget” show up every year. I use fruit branded products, even as a write this blog. But I think something has shifted during the early years of Green Marketing, where everything was green-washed, and sustainability was so overused that people may have turned away from being environmentally conscious. There might also be a connection to over abundance that we exhibit either intentionally or unintentionally. What we should be mindful of is that other countries are following our model, and I do not believe this is beneficial for all. In this discussion it is helpful to tie this back to the Triple Bottom Line of People, Places, and Finance. I’ve spoken about this in some of my other blogs and is always relevant in the community work that I do within Harrisburg. In the realm of digital and analog, I continue to see splits - us vs them. In the area of making, these show up in some of the resentment that artisans and craftspersons have had against the maker movement, or at least a singular maker movement that looks at tech, gadgets, and electronics. I see this with the terms STEM and STEAM. The STEM group wonders why they have to add in Art to the acronym. I think this resentment is misplaced as I know of the work by Neil Gersnhenfeld and embodied in a quote from Michael Stacey’s 2014 paper, The FAB LAB Network: A Global Platform for Digital Invention, Education and Entrepreneurship.
“MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld never felt comfortable with the division of labor in secondary and postsecondary education systems. He describes his experience of being pushed away from shop class toward math classes in high school because he was obviously intellectually gifted. ‘By the time I went to school, college-bound kids like me had to sit in rather sterile classrooms, while the kids taking up trades got to go to a vocational school that had all the cool stuff.’8 Writing about the rise of personal manufacturing leading to Fab Labs, he suggests that as far back as the Renaissance, the educational world has been trapped in a rigid dichotomy between the academic liberal arts and what might be called the “illiberal” arts of tinkering and manufacturing.9 He thinks this division has been perpetuated at specific modern historical junctures, such as the birth of computer science as an academic discipline in the 1950s, which trapped computer programming in the precise world of software, distant from the messiness of reality. When Gershenfeld founded MIT’s CBA in 2001, it was his intention to muddy the waters between software, information, and bits, on the one hand, and hardware, manufacturing, and atoms, on the other. “
(8. Neil Gershenfeld, Fab: the Coming Revolution in Personal Manufacturing, Basic Books, 2008, 31. 9. Fab, p. 34.)
As I read through the Comprehensive Plan (Chapter 08 Economic Development) the last month and a half, I started to really see the link of the power of the maker concepts in changing our current economic status. I've been following this since my teaching days at HACC in 2011 (Race Against the Machine and Machine, Platform, Crowd) that there are opportunities for this maker movement to transform communities. It has been seen time and time again, within an openess to allow for equity and fairness. It is the right time to do the necessary ground work to ensure that this happens so the next generation has the ability to harness what is in described in the title of Michael Stacey's paper:
INVENTION,
EDUCATION and
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
“From Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh to rugged-outdoors towns like Burlington, Vermont, the maker movement is providing localities a framework for unlocking growth and engaging citizens. Thinking long term is one of the critical things that all cities have to do and Burlington has been hard at work preparing the next generation of makers. The city, in a reflection of a growing number of communities, is leveraging the power of its library system as a learning tool beyond books, with 14 libraries in the region offering maker workshops for K-12 students.”
This is happening as we are in the Digital Dark Ages / Informational Black Hole (the very concern that future machines/processes may not be able to access what we are currently producing in a digital form.) There is much to be considering at this point in time. I also wish to mention another another great video titled The Maker Movement: Innovating Traditional Crafts or Colonizing Artisans?, which contains a good presentation and global research by re:publica15, featuring Gesche Joost, Juliet Wanyiri, and Anna Waldman-Brown. I’ve only skimmed through this and look forward to points to contrast the maker movement in developing countries as a new form of colonization. In essence any new initiatives should deeply contemplate “disruption” to existing. This is very palpable in the Comprehensive Plan. We should bookmark that for a future blog post on Innovation Districts and Schools. I am certain that as a January 10th Planning Commission Hearing occurs, it will ignite more good discussion about the needs of our city.
With that thought, we should carefully consider the very real possibility developing in our culture of Us vs Them. This has been on my mind as one considers Triple Botton Line or Collective Impact. I was reminded of Pink Floyd’s song Us and Them, from the 3/1/1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon. The song is about the senselessness of war and I see it as very pertinent for our current times.
“Black and blue
And who knows
which is which
and who is who
Up and down
And in the end
it's only
round 'n round”
Reference to the term "Dark Side of the Moon" can be found at How Stuff Works and Planetary.com.
So I do not have the time or resources to dig very deeply into the issues discussed in this blog. These things surface in the daily work within the Foundry. It is something that I have connected to in the daily making process and inhabiting the 4Cs (creativity, communication, collaboration, critical-thinking). This was ever so clear when Bret Peters and I attended a Community Partnership Day at SciTech on 12/13/17. It was during the opening presentation where Bret showed Harrisburg’s history with the City Beautiful Movement, consisting of Mira Lloyd Dock, J. Horace McFarland, and Vance McCormick that linked other cities such as San Antonio, Coral Gables, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Washington D.C. and Denver. It was something to pause and consider. Over 100 years later, the residents of Harrisburg enjoy a large planning initiative that forever changed the physicality of Harrisburg. I do not know if it was something students would recall the next time they visit Susquehanna River’s edge, or travel the Harrisburg Greenbelt.
Determining Value (an ongoing 2018 discussion):
There may be many approaches to answer a question “how we might find value?” In community work, the two that have surfaced the past year in my discussion with others are: Appreciative Inquiry and Collective Impact I have been practicing these within the Foundry and within a community group called Harrisburg Region - Communities Practicing Resilience (HbgCPR). What continues to circulate is the need to understand Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Trauma Informed Community Building.
Appreciative Inquiry (4Ds)
Collective Impact
Public Engagement Process
To close out this month's blog submission, I wish all our readers, Happy 2018!
I have hope that by operating in the messy work of relationships, we might push on to a very meaningful 2018, a year that considers a Harrisburg For All.