 So, my name is Beth Marhenka. I'm the acting AUL for user services and engagement and I'm Donna Dean I'm the manager of the maker hub and so today we're going to talk about beyond tools in space building a community of practice for making So I believe in the unbounded creativity of humans whose capabilities are augmented by powerful technologies and supportive social structures These are the words of the distinguished University of Maryland computer science professor Ben Schneiderman in his 2016 book entitled new ABCs of research achieving breakthrough collaborations and Schneiderman contends that by combining applied and basic research practices We will see more rapid progress in both spheres as we seek to obtain powerful new knowledge and solve complex societal problems So Schneiderman's description of the ABC research life cycle, which is you'll see in the middle column There is close similarity to the outline of traditional research, which is see on the left Typically undertaken by a single scholar and to the collaborative process of design thinking which is on the right hand column So so traditional research data collection research and analysis and then authoring publication and dissemination storage and archive and presentation And then Schneiderman's ABC research life cycles, you know, you choose an actionable problem And then apply observation and interventional and control and experiments and then you form teams Right with diverse individuals to solve problems and you test your ideas and prototype And then promote and adopt the and assess the impact and that's very similar to design thinking process with you empathize Define the problem ideate with other people prototype and then test So it is in the words of scholars Michael shank and Jeffers Schnapp the unification between pure and applied scholarship between thinking and doing and we've seen this when the potential impact of design labs like this one at Stanford's d. School and Even encounter musings about whether design thinking will become the new liberal arts In the flourishing of maker spaces across many of our libraries, it's not by accident and not without precedent Libraries have long been labs for teaching learning problem-solving Productivity and have been sprouting new legs through the promotion of digital tools and methodologies So John Dewey said give pupils something to do not something to learn and The doing is of such nature as to demand thinking learning naturally results and Piaget said to understand is to invent and Prepare from the MIT media lab The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge So the idea that learning takes place through doing and leads to innovation. It's it's not new The challenge is that we need to leverage the resources in our maker spaces Beyond the initial wonder of new tools beyond making for making sake beyond limit the limitations of funding and expertise and into the process of designing new producers The producers who will be ever more capable of drawing the connection between pure and applied scholarship between thinking and doing Writing and making between knowledge and the world of things and between edification and entertainment Awesome, so if you really like the ideas and quotes expressed in those previous slides those are all heriots So big thanks to her for that And I find those words really inspiring to me as I think about ways that this maker hub that we've created, right? Which can be seen in a lot of different ways To the people by the people who use the space But it's helped me to focus how we talk about the kind of work We do in a way that really addresses both the current mission of the library and the university and the direction that Many people see education headed so The way we implement a lot of those ideas is unique to our specific context and Mission at Georgetown the way you might implement a similar type of space or those ideas In your in your spaces and universities might be different So I'm gonna talk a little bit about specifically what we did in the maker hub, but your mileage may vary All right, so the maker hub itself has a 1500 square foot space Equipped with both high-tech and low-tech tools. We've got the 3d printers and the laser cutters we've also had sewing machines and CNC routers and Print print shop and a wood shop and lots of Legos and art crafting tools Which we use extensively to support ideation design thinking and prototype exercises So both high-tech and low-tech things, but we're really going to get beyond these tools really fast The idea lab which we're very fortunate to have in a space adjacent to the maker hub is more of a space designed to facilitate Communication and collaboration and design it has lots of whiteboard tables. Everything is on wheels There's mobile walls so the spaces can be easily divided up with whiteboard walls We have a Lego table surrounded by comfy chairs, which is really great for thoughtful Conversation, especially when you like to be for people who like to be busy with their hands while they're talking about serious issues Again, we're very lucky to have a space where you can ideate and come up with ideas In a reflective space and they move right next door to a busy loud Frenetic space where all the making can happen So through building these spaces and thinking about how we want to support new models for research and design We've come up with a handful of engagement types that have really worked for us And again what works for you guys might be different Number one sort of at the core of what we do and what we found is very scalable for us is Supporting drop-in peer-to-peer learning. We're open four to five hours a day six days a week and during that time Anybody in the Georgetown community can walk into the space and get busy right away Learning how to turn their ideas in reality and much of the physical and service design of the space Which we spend a lot of time thinking about and are constantly iterating on one of the core goals there is how can we make sure that? Everybody will who walks in the door feels welcome and feels like they can start working right away How many roadblocks and bottlenecks can we eliminate on their path from turning idea into reality? to maintain our focus on Supporting the curriculum of Georgetown and the way that teaching is changing over time We also focus on deep engagement with faculty. We do one on One-on-one meetings with faculty to develop custom activities for professors across the university We do tours. We've designed entire curriculum integrations where we work with a class throughout the semester As well as just simple simply presenting lectures about the nature of maker spaces and maker culture and what that mean Might mean to other departments. So you might not know this but Georgetown doesn't have an engineering department or an architecture School, we don't have a lot of those programs that you might imagine make a lot of use of a maker space So we found a lot of utility in just being able to show people say hey This is a $2,000 3d printer. That's great for innovation for a certain class of people This 3d printer over here is $300. What changes when the tools of innovation get so Inexplicit inexpensive this this raspberry pi computer is $35 and I can use it to program for this $300 3d printer What changes in terms of policy global social impact social justice when you can put the tools of innovation in people's hands? So we found a lot of usefulness in just being able to surface these ideas to students who haven't been exposed to it in the Past in a living lab. It's actually putting these practices and ideas into action on a daily basis We also do lots of workshops, which are a great chance for For both our students to demonstrate teaching in a different type of capacity We have basic skill building workshops where our volunteers will teach someone about 3d printing And they get to think about different kinds of methodologies for imparting this knowledge We also do custom workshops where you invite people from outside the Georgetown community to partner up with other Campus departments to run workshops like the feminist wearables workshop We did with the Georgetown women coders club and our draw carve print Workshop that we did with a print master and maker neighbor I'll talk about that in a second Lauren Emirates with our special collections department So we could bring in real prints and also engage our audience with printmaking activities at the same time Also, we do just a lot of one-on-one consultations and project support It's anybody who walks in the door. They might just have an idea We're gonna sit down with them and work with them one-on-one to figure out what's feasible for them to do What's feasible in our space help them get outside support bring in External people through our network of contacts to help them work on projects as well again because recognizing that Education isn't just happening in the classrooms through you know one to many kind of exchanges But by students taking ideas in their own hands and pushing it forward under their own initiative Georgetown has a big entrepreneurial program So we support a lot of entrepreneurial work as well, but I mean last week I spent a lot of time helping a woman build toys for her cats So we don't particularly judge the kind of work you do in here because you never know where these things are Going to lead and it's that kind of non hierarchical approach to learning that we find Really puts us at the core of the future of learning in Georgetown Cool. So how do we do this? We don't have scads of money. We don't have a giant grant or a donation yet. If anybody has got want to write a check I'll take Venmo as well But we don't have a lot of staff right we have one full-time person part-time grad students a handful of work-study staff But it could be very difficult to make sure we're prepared to support every person that walks in the door with all these different types of skills here And again not having like a hardcore technical skill type of degree program at Georgetown We don't have that built-in skill base. So how do we do so much with so little like to point out on this slide here? You see all those those are aprons hanging up on that window at one of our events every volunteer in our space makes their own Apron and we like to hang them up to sort of show off the diversity of skill sets and approaches to making that are brought into the space on a daily basis So really core to what we do is all about building a community We want to create a group of people who have a vested interest in the success of the space who see intrinsic value in Meeting with others from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of skill sets and coming together to just get really excited About being in this dynamic space and when we have that as a core It makes it much easier to reach out for support to get help with different types of projects because it's an inherently Nice fun supportive place to be in where you know if you walk in the door You're likely to get help with whatever problem it is that you're working on and we see building that culture as In of itself a design exercise It effects everything from the time kind of software We write the kind of physical spaces that we design and the types of policies that we introduce to the space to create a supportive vested community Core to that community Our real superstars is our volunteers in our volunteer program So you know we have limited open hours, but if you're a volunteer in the space That means you work two hours a week and you get 24-7 access to the space so you these volunteers they start learning how to use all the tools and we have a bit of a scaffolding for them to upskill themselves to become more more better at at making and Become more valuable volunteers and as they grant gain and skills they become more vested in the space They bring their friends in and this is sort of our core grassroots people Last semester we had 40 about 40 volunteers this semester We have about 30 what we notice is a trend that fall seems to be a little bit Students have a bit more free time and in spring semester. It's a little bit less But we still have enough to keep the space running almost fully on volunteers So the volunteers are great There are undergrads grads even some staff and faculty are volunteers But what we notice is that we didn't necessarily have like really hardcore super skilled folks in all of the areas You know a lot of these students might not even have a lot of background with making so we started the maker neighbor program The maker neighbor program is kind of like the volunteer program for professionals and experts who might not be Georgetown Affiliated so they also work two hours a week. They get credentialed with ID cards as as Georgetown Affiliates and they also get access to the space and what we found is that these Maker neighbors as we call them become heavily invested in the space spending a lot more than there are a lot of two hours Working on projects with folks from all over the university on the left over there is Pascal Gerard who has become super engaged with Technology initiatives all over campus and bringing them into the space to develop them and on the right there is Lauren Emirates She's a print master who has taken over our print shop worked with our laser cutters to Develop laser cut typesets for printing presses and really show some really interesting connections between traditional craft and modern technologies. This has been really exciting for us All right, so success or so what are the some of the things that we've actually done with this We've picked three stories here if you guys are interested all give you a link to our website later We have the gelato and maker hub showcase where you can see lots of projects that have come out of the maker hub I just want to share a few that I think really well illustrate that connection between Some of the new models and traditional models for research as a practice that supported in the library and the work that we've done in The maker hub. Oh by the way, these are 3d scan brains from the neuroscience department and that students have been coming in So this is women is holding us 3d print of her own brain All right, so first off is maker cart again This is produced and actually donated us by donated us by Pascal Gerard Working with the Center for Social Justice. So the Center for Social Justice was looking for ways to help their community Learn how to teach stem Education to underserved schools in the Dallas in the DC area So we worked with them to develop maker cart the maker cart is this thing on the left there It's literally a cart on wheels It has got eight raspberry pi computer systems and eight Arduino electronics kits and not sufficient to keep 16 kids active doing stem activities for about two to three hours and as the maker hub We don't ourselves go out into these schools and teach these activities. We teach CSJ volunteers how to run these activities with really well documented Workbooks so that they can take this the cart and the activities that go out to schools and have an impact on the space This will allowed us to iterate on our design really quickly get feedback right away So again have that really rapid ideation and iteration process. That's so important while simultaneously having an immediate impact on the communities that we're trying to serve By a max you all finished breakfast. Okay, great. So Mark Connell was a senior in the School of Foreign Service, right? So not a physics not a biology not a technology major at all But he was taking a biology course during this course He learned that while there's lots of tests to understand various parts of the body There's not a good non-invasive test to understand what's going on in the gut biome of the human small intestine So working with folks in the maker hub working with our high resolution 3d printer And folks from the entrepreneurship department that we brought into the maker hub to work with him He developed a pill it's about yay big and getting getting smaller with every version that a person can swallow It's a mechanical device with electronics in it He built designed and built all of this himself and it mechanically activates inside the small intestine and samples samples and then this pill is Retrieved later in some manner And so doctors can finally tell what's going on in in like the bacteria biome of your small intestine Which is a little nasty, but also really fantastic and groundbreaking So he now has patents on this device and is working with researchers in West Virginia to bring it to the research market I love sharing the story, but also it's a little awkward Thirdly is a low-cost air quality monitoring system Developed by Colin McCormick and then facilitated by our maker neighbor Pascal Gerard So this class is taught in the science technology and international affairs class, which is primarily non technical students It's designed to show off the possibilities of low-cost technologies for crowdsourced Environmental monitoring you might remember after the Fukushima incident there was this DIY Geiger counters that were spread that were developed and spread out all over Japan that totally changed the way the radiation was being Tracked after that disaster This is a similar type of device using similar principles each one of these is solar powered it connects to Wi-Fi and reports Pollution information and temperature and humidity information to a cloud data surface and all of this is tracked in real time It's solar powered and they've been they all work every student built and programmed their own version of this again without being CS majors and They're working all over campus Pascal Gerard engaged with With Colin and they developed a version 2 that is smaller and even more efficient and this semester's class just finished building out You know 12 versions Copies of version 2 they're going out soon through our Jesuit network to schools in Hong Kong Lima and Nairobi and In Kenya so these again we're taking work that we're doing we're iterating on these things in conjunction with classes they're learning stuff they would not have learned in a traditional manner and Finally actually spreading that impact out into the world, which we're really excited about So what have we learned over the last four-year journey of creating this the maker hub We've learned that breaking down barriers is essential to interdisciplinary work and that libraries are particularly well-suited to support new models of learning and that bring communities of practice together And we believe strongly in opening up opportunities for lifelong learning and Exploration with diverse teams that encourage multiple people behind each project That's really been the success of a lot of the examples that Don brought up is that somebody comes in with an idea But the way that they can get it to happen is that they get expertise from other people that They teach them new skills a business major comes in and meet somebody from computer science And that's when the magic really happens that they learn these skills together and then develop a new product and even Several businesses have started because these partnerships that have come together There's so many problems that can't be solved Individually and they don't need to be if you have spaces and organizations that bring people together and at the very heart of What we want to offer is an environment where people problem solve together with a diversity of project types and a diversity of approaches And we also have learned that play can often be extremely important and can lead to real prototypes and Designs people come into the maker have frequently to use our button makers or to use a sewing machine And then they learn 3d printing and they come up with an idea for something else So for instance people like this is Sarah Harper. She's one of the staff in the in the maker hub And she got a grant a hands-on learning grant to develop and to build an aquaponics station And so the first step in that was prototyping so she worked with Don They were trying to figure out, you know how to build the aquaponics station Well, they did in Legos first and it was the perfect material that then she could move on and create the the actual aquaponics station so But so you need not only the spaces and the tools but the people the training and the support to take play to product and the maker hub through our Volunteer and the maker neighbor program and the larger maker network And the communities of practice provides that structure and that support So moving forward we want to expand curricular engagement through partnerships with faculty in the stem fields In the humanities from the business school and the med center and any other programs that are interested in working with us on campus And we want to increase support for research and of all shapes and kinds So today We've discussed strategies that have worked well for us at Georgetown But what's going to work on your campus to build the communities of practice and creativity and in innovation may be quite different So during yesterday's plenary Kathleen Fitzpatrick. She talked about Nobel laureate Eleanor Ostrom's theory of common pool resources. I Encourage you to go and look up Ostrom's theories so many of the the principles in Her theories deal with the community participation with the management of resources other as they're adapted to local situations So anyway, you have to ask those kinds of questions at your campus keep faculty engaged talk to students talk to other community members And that's what's going to help build your communities of practice And so we've got resources on a website Here's the URL and where you can find the slides here and links to the maker hub and our contact information And we have time for for questions