Maker culture

The recent Higher Education version of the Horizon Report highlights some interesting predicted trends for technology adoption. One that caught my eye is focused on the culture of user generated content - otherwise referred to as the creator society. Here's what Horizon says about this culture:

"The shift continues towards becoming a creator society. Today, society is increasingly mobile and continues to demonstrate evidence that creation is gaining traction over consumption. The Maker movement, user-generated videos, self-published eBooks, personalized domains, and other platforms have all seen steep increases in recent years. Higher education is now in a position to shift its curricular focus to ensure learning environments align with the engagement of creator-students and foster the critical thinking skills needed to fuel a creator society. Courses and degree plans across all disciplines at institutions are in the process of changing to reflect the importance of media creation, design, and entrepreneurship."

Horizon stresses that this is a mid-range trend that may take between 3 to 5 years to establish any significant changes in higher education. This may be an optimistic prediction, given the resistance with which change is met by many traditional universities. It is clear that some universities, as always, will be at the vanguard of any significant changes, whereas many others will drag their collective feet. Those who forge collectively ahead will change their courses to accommodate student use of technologies to create their own content, and change their assessment methods too. We can expect for example to see some of the more visionary professors encouraging their students to create and edit Wikipedia pages for course credits, or publish their own articles and books through open publishing for Kindle or other e-book platforms. Some may even decide to publish their own personal research through similar outputs. Those who involve themselves in constructing and building tangible objects to support their own learning are engaged in a process Seymour Papert called Constructionism - or learning through making. It is powerful because it is often situated in real contexts, and is therefore authentic and experiential. These activities are already being adopted by the innovators within the higher education sector, but how long will it take for these practices to become widespread, or even common places practices in universities? What will it take to break the strangle hold pay-per-read publishers have over government research funding regimes? 

I wrote in a recent blog post that I and some of my colleagues are already encouraging students to produce assignments that are non-traditional - that is, based upon digital media, rather than submitted as paper based essays. Those students who have decided to submit their work for assessment using a digital alternative have been unequivocal in their positivity. They feel liberated to express themselves in new ways, feel that digital assignments are more representative of the culture they are most familiar with, and argue that it provides them with greater scope to address all of the assessment criteria and course materials. It has taken some time to convince administrators that students can submit their assignments as blogs or videos, and that it is neither feasible nor reasonable to ask for these to be 'printed out' in paper format. The struggle against bureaucracy will no doubt continue, and may be one of the most difficult and trenchant barriers to overcome. Regardless of this, I believe that the onward march of user generated content, the maker culture, the creator society, is now unstoppable. It is only a matter of time when it becomes acceptable practice for all universities. Whether it takes 3 years or 30 is up for grabs.

Photo from Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University on Wikimedia Commons


Maker culture by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.