Make, Play, Learn

Editor's Notes

• #4: So I need a volunteer to come up here and help me with this next part…. How did you feel? Think about when you ask this question of Preps – their response; now think about Year 6 students…. And now think about adults; Why are we afraid of failing? How does this limit us?
• #5: Today, with access to unlimited resources via the internet, and with technology becoming less expensive and more accessible than ever before, the ability for students to create amazing things is definitely within reach.
• #6: Stager and Martinez begin Invent to Learn with an awesome chapter called ‘An insanely brief and incomplete history of making’. Here, they describe some of the educators and theorists who have held up the concepts and ideas which underpin the idea of hands on play and invention. I think that this is really important to be familiar with; it’s good to have some research, and information to respond to questions from administration, parents, other teachers who want to know why you are choosing to bring some of these ideas into your learning space, and to understand that makerspaces may not be just a fad after all.
• #7: Da Vinci has been named ‘the greatest maker of all time’. His genius was across a wide range of fields, and he was known as an artist, inventor, architect, engineer, musician, mathematician and anatomist. His creativity extended from The Arts and into Science and Maths - which is something that we don’t see as much today; people tend to categorise themselves as either ‘sciences’ or ‘humanities’ and there is often little connection made between different fields. Making gives us the opportunity connect different skills, as it reaches across many different disciplinary areas in the construction of a project; as we shall see later in this presentation, the ability to work in cross-disciplinary teams is becoming increasingly important in contemporary employment.
• #9: The NMC Horizon Project charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. Its annual reports have, since 2004, drawn on the opinions of global experts to identify key trends, significant challenges, and important developments in educational technology, with separate reports for K-12, Higher Education, Libraries and Museums.   Emphasising trends which highlight …. Deeper learning approaches: the mastery of content that engages students in critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and self-directed learning.
• #10: Traditionally, schools prepared students for the world of work. To continue to do this, we must be aware of the types of jobs we are preparing our students to do. It is really difficult to predict specific jobs of the future; things change so quickly, and we can’t predict what we don’t know; so the Future Work Skills 2020 report instead focused on generic skills – the proficiencies and abilities that are most likely to be needed across multiple jobs and work settings.
• #11: You can see that the drivers of change in the job market are the rise of smart machines and systems – robotics, and technology that replaces the need for people to do simple, repetitive tasks. According to the report, changing technologies are also bringing about new ways of communicating, which require the development of new literacies to cope with multimedia, hyperlinked text, critical evaluation and the ability to deal with overwhelming amounts of data and information. Every object, every interaction, everything we come into contact with will be converted into data. Thus we will usher in an era of “everything is programmable”—an era of thinking about the world in computational, programmable, designable terms. All of this, combined with the increasing interconnectedness of the globe means that we will need workers who can work with diverse cultures, are skilled in novel and adaptive thinking, who have a design mindset, who have computational thinking skills, and who are trans-disciplinary.
• #12: The Foundation for Young Australians, (FYA) - a national independent non-profit organisation recently released this report, calling for a national enterprise skills strategy to address current and future employment issues for young Australians who are entering an economy which is rapidly changing, at a time when our numbers of working taxpayers are shrinking as the baby boomer generation moves into retirement. This report echoes the findings of the Future Work Skills 2020 report from 2011; they identify enterprise skills such as communication, project management, digital literacy, creativity, innovation and the ability to critically assess and analyse information as ones that are transferable, and a more powerful predictor of success than technical knowledge.
• #13: FYA finds that currently, students are being prepared for an economic past. As ever smarter machines perform ever-more human tasks, some 40% of current jobs are considered high risk of automation over the next 10-15 years; Non routine work, which requires interpersonal or environmental adaptability or problem solving and creativity are less exposed to the rise of smart machines. This is combined with an increasing need for digital literacy.
• #14: In a global economy that is digitally enabled, we need a workforce that is digitally literate. The report by FYA finds that there has been a lack of clarity around the term ‘digital literacy’, and in response they have used a framework developed by the UK Forum on Computing Education which classified four bands of digital skills: digital muggle, digital citizen, digital worker and digital maker. The FYA report used the UK framework to analyse the digital skill requirements of 405 occupations; in doing so, their analysis showed that more than 90% of Australia’s current workforce will need to be at least a digital citizen, and that more than 50% of Australian workers will need to operate at the digital worker or maker level in the next 2-3 years; we need to introduce digital technologies into our schools, and fast!!
• #15: Among the key things employers want are transferable enterprise skills – things like project management, communication and financial literacy. These skills – once referred to as ‘soft skills’ are now must haves. But despite the demand, young Australians aren’t adequately equipped with the skills. ‘We need to teach enterprise skills, starting in primary school and building year on year throughout high school. These must be taught in ways students want to learn, through experience and immersion with peers. We need to support our teachers to resource students for the fluid, complex, enterprising new work order. Concurrently, parents must be provided with information about the skills their children will need to craft and navigate multiple careers. Urgently, we need to engage students, schools, industry and parents to understand the new work order which whilst less stable and predictable, is rich in opportunity.’ Jan Owen AM CEO Foundation for Young Australians
• #16: Enterprise skills are transferable skills that enable young people to engage with a complex world and navigate the challenges they will inherit.Enterprise skills are not just for entrepreneurs; they are skills that are required in many jobs. They have been found to be a powerful predictor of longterm job success. Skills classified as enterprise skills include: problemsolving, communication skills, digital literacy, teamwork, presentation skills, critical thinking, creativity, financial literacy
• #18: We are searching for new ways to meet the needs of students, to engage them and to allow them to develop the skills and knowledges that they will need to live happily in a world that is constantly changing. One way that might enable this is connected learning. Connected learning is the sweet spot – where a student’s interests, their peer culture and academic goals are able to coincide. When this type of learning happens, it is connected; not only because the different sectors of their life find synchronicity, but also because of the connectedness of the digital tools that they are probably using in order for this learning to take place. An example of connected learning may be a ‘code club’ – where students whose personal interests are in code and coding are able to meet together with like minded peers (who may be their own age, and skill level, or may be older or younger, serving as mentors or requiring them to act as mentors). If this learning coincides with academic goals (for example there may be Mathematical, science and digital technology learning happening here), then a connected learning environment may develop. You can see how a Makerspace could be an important stimulus for this type of learning – and may offer students the opportunity to discover skills or interests, a peer culture they never knew existed, and also be meeting academic goals.
• #19: A great deal of the information that I am sharing today is either from, or inspired by these two titles. Invent to Learn is by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, who I was fortunate enough to meet at a workshop, and who sparked my interest in this area. This book is a bible for anyone wanting to embed making into learning. The second resource is the Makerspace Playbook from Maker Media, which is a global platform, and the publisher of Make Magazine. This is their education publication, and it is a free PDF download which provides an indepth guide for how schools can develop their own Maker Spaces. It also gives information on tools and materials required, the roles teachers, students and mentors play, snapshots of school-based Maker Spaces in action, templates for project and safety plans and more. The third resource is actually two separate free publications from MakerEd – the first is a practical guide to hands on youth makerspaces, and the second is a selection of literature to provide background information for makerspaces. These are both free PDF downloads. All of the resources including these, and links that I refer to during this workshop will be available through my Pinterest board and I’ll share the link for that at the end.