Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “National Maker Faire: Westport Library Maker Space”.
Hi, I’m Dale Dougherty and we’re here at the National maker faire on the UDC campus and I’m talking to Bill dairy of the Westport library in Connecticut hi Bill hi. How you doing that’s good! So you have a library with a makerspace. You also host a maker faire. We do where we’re the co-creators of the maker faire and we get about 60 blast ieper.
We had 6,500 people there. Let’S start with that. Mark mid-sized went to members in the community that came to you and said I want to do a maker faire.
Can I have a room? What was your response? The library usually doesn’t do this, but what we said was no, you can’t have just a room. You can have the whole library and will co-produce it with you and that’s four years ago, and we thought oh, I wonder how many people will come. Maybe eight hundred twenty-two hundred people showed up at the first one second, one over three thousand and we’re up to 6,500.
Now, that’s great and so you’ve integrated this into the library as well. Well, the community said: okay, now we’re going to do and it was like a needs assessment that we didn’t expect to do with a maker faire, but that’s what it was and they said. Can you make something where every day we could have making activities and from that our director and a small group of us got together and we found an engineer architect who put together a fantastic makerspace made out of metal, but it’s old and new about? We had airplanes created copies of the gb granville, the early grandville brother planes, and they fly in our maker space.
So flight of the imagination was our first thing. Tell me: what do you see for kids in this maker space and even adults if it applies well? What we see is engagement, what we see is ownership. What we see is their ideas coming to life. We see eight-year-olds training, 80 something-year-old.
We see 80 something-year-old sharing with 10 year olds. So there’s this intergenerational opportunity that schools don’t really have in libraries, don’t always know they don’t, but more and more libraries are seeing wow. This is a new way to engage our community. Well, I think you said it to talk the other day.
You know things are changing when you see a group of librarians learning to solder right. Well, that was one of the first activities we did after hearing John Seely Brown talk about a new culture of learning and mentioning that hey, let’s start with the Maker Faire. So we thought why not go all the way, get these soldering irons and introduce it as maybe a fundamental maker skill yeah when you bought the other day describe what that artificial plateau. That was an interesting idea.
Well John Seely Brown said in the past, which isn’t very long ago when you learned a new skill. It was that traditional s-curve, where you go into it, you learn the skill you climb, the wall, you take a tutorial, you’ll, learn from your colleagues and then you level out in a plateau where’s the plateau. Now we’ve got an s-curve up against an S curve so that constant rapid change is impossible.
If you can’t find an artificial plateau, making tinkering playing provide this artificial and it’s sort of like meditation, like your hobby you’re in a mode of flow play, is the closest thing that it gets too, and so communities coming to the library can find that artificial plateau Opportunities to be and learn right, so with all the change going on around us, instead of being stressed out about it right, you actually kind of get in the grid in a flow yeah flow yeah, the libraries as flow yeah. So the other thing that you talked about that i thought was wonderful and dramatically presented, i might add by you, taking off your jacket and shirt, was to show us your t-shirt, which said maker madness. Tell me what make her madness was okay.
Well, we had this idea March. Madness usually goes with sports, but we thought, let’s open up the library all night, make her madness, midnight maker madness at the library, so we advertised it and we got 60 people to come in at eight o’clock at night. Do video production, amulet creation belt making learn how to draw 3d printing arduino using duct tape to build things and a drum circle at 2am when the clocks turned ahead one hour so and we had a set making group that transformed the library into like AIT’s a Futuristic but primitive space for a drum circle, so it was a night of making like I made it through the night at the westport library. But it’s not an immersive learning environment day and it’s amazing how you can get depth out of it. A 12 hour period of time, so we went into more depth with Arduino and sketchup. Then we would have been a normal workshop. That’S great! Well, I think, that’s a great idea. We should talk about how that might spread next March. We should do it around the country. Okay, I love it.
I’M there overnight, we can do it mark yeah Dean. You tell me about one of the kids in your makerspace specific kid. It’S here today, uh AJ, Lahiri who’s here today is a senior this year he’s been here for two years at a technical school in Stanford Connecticut. He is a math whiz.
He is, he is in his brain a lot. I mean he’s a more introverted he’s here today, though, sharing what he knows with people, it’s the 21st century skill of storytelling, communicating and being able to be responsible that that’s that’s what happens in a makerspace he’s in charge of his learning so well built. Thank you for what you’re doing and your inspiration, yeah and say hi to mark and all the good folks back in westport. Thank you.
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