Guided Ride #3 Tom van Doveren
March 7, 2018 - Landscape of Education / Mistakes in Education
To gain more insights on teachers making mistakes I try to find teachers who are active in maker education. In Rotterdam, Tom is one of the makers of/in education. A few years back he started HET LAB, a social enterprise which helps kids to learn through making.
Tom is one of the organizers of a makers conference in Rotterdam. At this event he’d like to find an answer on “how do we get schools out of their isolement?” After a short explanation of my research he offers me an table at the break-out sessions at the conference.
He is currently working on a map in which becomes clear what maturity level a school is in, when talking or working with maker education. Maybe our maps can be combined or be helpful for one another. Next to that there is an initiative to find white spots on the geographic map on schools and maker education. Is there enough activity in North, South, West and so on. It would be great if schools are able to ask themselves: What do I need to start or continue maker education and what can I offer to other schools? This perfectly fits my approach. Tom is familiar with the fight of walking (running?) ahead. When he started schools told him “we don’t have computers and we don’t need them”, and he discovers comparable resistance with maker education today. He wonders how we can prevent maker education to become a trend what is fading away in a few years. I believe that we need to find the early adopters and schools who are in the next layer around them, ready for maker education because it fits their way of working. It is OK if maker education is a hype at the hype cycle of Gartner, and there will be a drop. Don’t worry, but the question is how do we recover from that. Let’s not go there already.
Tom shares a lot of initiatives who are working on/with this topic. Helpful! A lot of these movements will join the conference at 28th March. That would be a great stage for my research as well. Looking forward to it!
Tom also agreed to join the probe for a week. Starting today.