TOPIC SESSION 1 - LEARN
Faclitators - Lit Lao (Founder, Litchee Lab), Andre Maia Chagas(Researcher, educator using open science equipment), Pierre P (builds Open Science Hardware for public health).
By learn, we mean how the GOSH community learns about itself, the contexts in which it currently operates, and the ways in which OScH impacts society.
We started by discussing the difference between makers and educators. Following perspectives were presented :
- Let the students identify what they want and facilitate them to build it, instead of teaching them a fixed set of things.
- Learning is hard and we must not intend to make it too simple for the learners (as opposed to point [1]). Instead, we must enable them to learn on their own by constantly challenging them.
- Instead of teaching students, we must help them identify and solve the community’s problems. Important skills include empathy, setting goals, finding and working with mentors, etc.
- We must build open tools to help educators turn into makers and makers into educators to bridge their skill gap.
- A lot of education happens outside the classroom, in complex communities that we must not forget about while building a product for society.
- The goal is to eventually make the learner independent, comfortable and motivated to work more and more on open hardware in future.
The next topic discussed was how do we monitor and measure if learning was successful. Following are the five metrics that were proposed -
- How well the participants repeat what was covered (least favorite).
- How many times the participants use exactly what they learnt in different situations.
- How many different original projects they create after the workshop.
- How many more people they exchange and engage with in their environment.
- How they engage with a new topic an its people in an open way.
Currently, there is a lot of emphasis on rote learning and examinations in traditional educational systems. We must progress towards more organic, realistic and self-developing methods of education and have focus on metrics aligned with the same.
The Journal of Open Hardware is starting a section on Open Hardware Education. Email : tobias.wenzel@embl.de