This session with Martin Wallace of UT Arlington was very informative and innovative.
At first it struck me that the maker-based competencies that are being developed are little more than a bend of critical thinking skills, soft skills, and common sense. That being said, as I thought about it some more, taking a new perspective on well-established concepts and accepted human expressions or traits is really what being a maker is about.
I am very encouraged by the inclusiveness of these competencies. The scope of allowed approaches to learning and knowledge creation have grown so exponentially since I was a kid in school, subsequently making learning more accessible. Tying these rather complex intellectual human efforts to an end-product by bench marking the important segments in rubric-like fashion scaffolds these nascent ideas and legitimizes the emerging theories that will follow.
At first it struck me that the maker-based competencies that are being developed are little more than a bend of critical thinking skills, soft skills, and common sense. That being said, as I thought about it some more, taking a new perspective on well-established concepts and accepted human expressions or traits is really what being a maker is about.
I am very encouraged by the inclusiveness of these competencies. The scope of allowed approaches to learning and knowledge creation have grown so exponentially since I was a kid in school, subsequently making learning more accessible. Tying these rather complex intellectual human efforts to an end-product by bench marking the important segments in rubric-like fashion scaffolds these nascent ideas and legitimizes the emerging theories that will follow.