Maker Spaces, Learning And Reality

How we explain reality to ourselves is a construction with many parts. We gather knowledge and generate meaning through our experiences and traditions; from what we learn in school, at work and at home; from how we witness others explaining reality for themselves (on TV, via social media, etc). This narrative that we tell ourselves everyday throughout our entire lives largely defines who we are and how we approach the world. The first time I ran (in Mexico) an adaptation of Stanford's workshop "Makers in Residence" (an intensive 80 hour program for high schoolers on digital fabrication and design thinking which was designed by the Transformative Learning Technology Lab) I was shocked by the comments of participants regarding their place in relation to technology. Most participants were impressed that they were "smarter" than the computers they programmed; when I asked them more about it I started understanding the new narrative that a generation of kids growing up surrounded by digital technology are developing in their heads.