[ Thanks to Bernard Swiss
for this link. ]
“Some of the things we came across in the first few
classes were jawdropping. Like the video MacPhail showed us of a
three-dimensional printer that’s able to replicate itself (you’ll
learn read about 3D printers in the Fabricator episode). Even so,
we were not quite sure what Maker Culture was and what it had to do
with us. “I guess I kind of thought that, you know, people had
always been making things,” said Geoff Turner, a UWO student in the
Masters of Journalism program. He wasn’t wrong. There have always
been makers: web-hackers, hobbyists and ancient ancestors who
created tools of survival. But the modern Maker Culture movement is
more involved than that. It’s about sharing what you’ve made, how
you’ve made it, and why. Often, for free.“”Another word for it is the Enlightenment,” said Cory Doctorow,
a Canadian science fiction writer, activist and the author of the
book Makers. “The advent of… public sharing of information and
knowledge was the Enlightenment. It was the great leap in human
progress that ended the dark ages.” It is this sense of sharing and
community that binds the self-educator to the broom-smith, and the
broom-smith to a food artist who makes necklaces made of dried
kiwi. What MacPhail noticed, and challenged us to document, was an
over-arching cultural shift — Maker Culture.”