Hacking the knowledge of maker communities for Education

The project addresses the need to rethink education to be effective in a changing environment. More concretely we look at the intersection of craft-based learning, digital fabrication technologies and schools’ capacities to absorb educational innovations. Although making and hacking are known activities within constructionist learning settings, they are not yet widespread at a school level. The aim of this project was to test the possibilities of reusing existing knowledge embedded in platforms such as instructables.com. A first prototype was implemented and evaluated, showing the importance of discussing the value and limitations of resources external to educational systems, learning by doing, accountability and the right to tinker in technology-embedded teaching.

Using the available API, we created a network graph of 225,681 instructables authored by 74,824 authors. The potential of that knowledge base is analysed in two steps: first, we describe the available content on the platform in terms of topics, structure and licenses and second, we explore the value of topic networks, to make platform knowledge more accessible to educators and learners themselves. A more in-depth description of the research can be found in this related publications:

Voigt, C., Mair, S., & Unterfrauner, E. (2018). Hacking the knowledge of maker communities  in support of 21st century education In International Conference on Internet Science. St Petersburg, RU: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01437-7_22