My 8th Lesson Learned at
ABLA 2016, Houston, TX
“CTJ’s Makerspace: Designing
Memorable Learning Experiences”
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School of English
Faculty
of Social Sciences
Universidad
Latina de Costa Rica
Thursday, September 15,
2016
Post 292
Many times I have walked into our
Binational Center’s (BNC) library to find it empty of users but a handful of
elderly ones who are used to coming almost every day. I have had the same
feeling when visiting the Campus Library at the private college I also work
for, a place where people go to sleep or to get a seat to let the hours pass
by. Then I also get to wonder if this is the same kind of experience people are
living when crossing the threshold to their community’s libraries or in the
higher education institutions they are studying at, too. And if this were the
situation across our home countries, what kind of shift in the conception of a
library is taking place nowadays?
While attending Daniela Lyra Cardoso’s
presentation at the ABLA 2016 convention in Houston, TX, I got confronted with
the concept of “makerspace” for libraries. And as she stated in the
introduction to her talk, “in a rapidly changing world, powered by social media
and instant information, learning opportunities can be found everywhere” (Cardoso, 2016) ; but are we really
taking advantage of all these learning chances that our dynamic world is
providing us to teach our pupils? With the panorama described above, walking
into a library today is making me believe that language performers in a BNC’s
library do not take advantage of the treasures it has and that college students
lack the ability to profit from a library’s services to get information for
their course projects.
Cardoso (2016) introduced many of us
newbies to ABLA to the concept of “the makerspace movement.” I must confess
that though I work for an BNC in Costa Rica in the area of curriculum, I have
never heard of this movement before, but when I had a chance to see what
libraries in the US and in other BNCs are doing nowadays, I started wondering
why it is that we fell so behind in this learning, collaboration trend. Cardoso,
who is working for Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brasilia (Brazil) showed us the
great things that a makerspace in a library can do for a BNC and for the community
where that institution is located. The more that Cardoso spoke, the more
interested I became in the topic and in the initiative this Brazilian
institution had devised to reach out to the community surrounding them. Was I
then witnessing a change in paradigm in the conception of what libraries should
be now that we are far into the 21st Century?
Trying to give an answer to my
question linked to a paradigm shift in what a library should be today, I first
needed to understand the importance of the makerspace movement. As it is explained by Rendina (n.d.), “The
Maker Movement has been around for a lot longer than many of us realize. Really,
the desire to make things with our hands has existed since the dawn of man, and
DIY culture has long played an important role in humanity.” And somehow all of
us are part of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture since we like to do things with
our hands; hands-on activities can be more memorable and long-lasting for our
learning than a mere explanation. Creativity is exercised and boosted with the
aid of a makerspace for all kinds of library users. “Makerspaces combine
manufacturing equipment, community, and education for the purposes of enabling
community members to design, prototype and create manufactured works that
wouldn’t be possible to create with the resources available to individuals
working along” (Makerspace.Com, n.d.) . This is a space open
to the community and the students so they can exercise their creativity and
collaboration and people skills with other members of that very same community.
The library becomes a “think tank” for collaborative library users.
Has the concept of libraries changed
or evolved in this post-technology Internet revolution? With the advent of the
Internet, an information revolution was to come; by having information a click
away from home or from one’s mobile device changed the way we learn today.
Libraries are not massively visited by learners nowadays. And this is happening
because library’s decision-makers have not yet comprehended that the concept of
what a library is has been evolving and including more ways of using the
library space. And depending on the kind of library that is being run, we can
get learning spaces like the one depicted by Cardoso during her presentation at
ABLA 2016 where learners are everywhere in the library exercising their creativity
regardless of the language that it is being used by library users.
Having all these ideas revolving in my
mind for several weeks now, I wanted to contribute a bit with this new
conception of libraries in the 21st Century though I am no expert in
the field. It seems to me, a practical educator, that we are in the verge of
time where libraries’ effort needs to be refocused to embrace different ways of
learning, to bring the people to make use of resources they have to offer, to help
people develop multi-literacies and not just the black and white print books, to
promote the learning of history, values, culture and so on, differently. The
checklist created is indeed based on many of the sensible words spoken by
Cardoso and my particular way of seeing a library in a BNC like the one we have
in Costa Rica.
As
Cardoso (2016) explained in her ABLA 2016 Presentation, the library of the 21st
Century is a place with a people-focused mission. A vital institutional space
like a library needs to be a place for innovation. The space must invite
learners to experience it differently with creativity boosters and spaces to
help them co-construct their knowledge collaborativiely. As Cardoso (2016) also
stated, it needs to be place where BNCs or higher education institutions, and
why not community organizations, help all individuals become better for the
world, for their families, for their nations, and for themselves. A library
needs to be a place where learners can come to investigate the world to
comprehend what is happening around us and take action when such things affect
us all; we are providing them with spaces to become globally competent since
discussions held in our libraries can become ways to help all individuals weigh
perspectives coming from different angles. Libraries can become spaces to
promote positive changes in our communities.
If innovation is to think out of the
box, the libraries can be those places where creativity can be boosted and
exercised. Part of this think-out-of-the-box perspective for library use –no doubt-
connects with the ideas presented by Cardoso (2016) during her presentation; by
means of these public spaces we can create in our local libraries can help our
citizens to learn how to communicate ideas to diverse groups of individuals. A
makerspace or other action plans we can devise for our libraries are ways to
help education in our home countries to be much better and ready to reach out
to our communities. I hope not to ask my learners in the future, “how often do
you check material from a library?,” and get statistics like this:
Number of Sts polled: 12
|
Topic: Library Use
|
Ages: 19-26
|
1
out of 12 checked out a book in the last 2 years
|
8.33%
|
|
5
out of 12 have never been to the campus library
|
41.67%
|
|
7
out of 12 have been to the library for other reasons not connected to
consulting material
|
58.33%
|
|
0
out of 12 have participated in a talk organized by the campus library
|
0.00%
|
|
2
out of 12 have heard of multi-literacies and how they can boost their
learning
|
16.67%
|
|
4
out of 12 have actually used the library to get together to collaborate on
school projects
|
33.33%
|
|
Libraries’
need for innovation is more than present in this quick poll I made among my
university students. But the fact that a library needs to invite learners to
experience it differently is more than evident nowadays. I wish our libraries
became makerspaces and places to generate discussion and consolidate
communities of learning and communities of practice.
References
Cardoso,
D. (2016, August 16-19). CTJ's Makerspace: Designing Memorable Learning
Experiences. 21st Century
Challenges ABLA 2016 Convention Program, Houston, TX. Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico:
Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales.
Makerspace.Com. (n.d.). What's a Makerspace?
Retrieved from Makerspace.Com: http://spaces.makerspace.com/
Rendina, D. (n.d.). MakerSpace Resources. Retrieved
from Renovated Learning: http://renovatedlearning.com/makerspace-resources/
Additional Resources to Understand a bit more what a makerspace is all about.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
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