Fab Lab: Learing for the 21st Century
Paulo Blikstein, Stanford, uses a Fab Lab as teaching environment: “The purpose of the project is twofold: first, to inspire children to love math and science through hands-on projects, and second, to equip children with the skills needed in the 21st century economy”, he told students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who are preparing for a trip to Brazil.
Paulo Blikstein’s work is based on Seymour Papert’s theory, Constructionism, see e.g. his paper on Technology as an Agent of Emancipation: Travels in Troy with Freire.
The important learning in a Fab Lab happens in the most basic, small, personal transactions:
The most significant part of students’ learning experiences resides in the small power struggles, the minute decisions, the microscopic choices of what to teach and what to value, who has voice, who ultimately decides. It is precisely in those apparently insignificant pedagogical and personal transactions that the essence of the atmosphere is constructed.
Yet the overall approach is nothing else than disposing of traditional teaching to facilitate authentic learning:
Technology is a new kind of Trojan Horse: the educator introduces into the classroom familiar tools, practices and technologies, yet embedded in this familiarity is a potential for affective and conceptual change – a beneficial potential that surreptitiously permeates the classroom atmosphere through a sequence of displacements mediated by the experienced teacher. Students appropriate the Trojan technology as authentic means to liberate themselves from the incarceration of traditional pedagogy. Once deschooled, students shake off the dust and engage in authentic inquiry and construction.
Paulo Blikstein is an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, Stanford University.