John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

written by researchers at the CBA. Gershenfeld predicts that Fab Lab prices will
follow the path of PCs. With volume production and increased demand the cost
of these high-tech do-it-yourself systems could fall dramatically.
These Fab Labs grew out of an MIT course called ‘How to Make (almost)
Anything’ in 1998. Gershenfeld was astonished when ten students showed up
for every available place in the class.
"…they were motivated by the desire to make things they'd always
wanted, but that didn't exist." (Gershenfeld, 2005 p.6)
These students had skill sets that were more suited to arts and crafts than
advanced engineering - which was not a disadvantage. Gershenfeld states the
learning process for these students was driven by the demand for knowledge
rather than the usual model which is driven by the supply of knowledge. What
is important to realise from this is the students were single-handedly designing
and building complex systems. This is distinct from an industrial setting where
tasks are distributed over teams of specialists who collectively conceive, design,
and produce a product. Furthermore, once these students had mastered a new
process, they would show others how to use it. In this way, new skills were
introduced through project-led learning and this knowledge was disseminated
from peer to peer.
“This process can be thought of as a "just-in-time" educational model,
teaching on demand, rather than the more traditional "just-in-case"
model that covers a curriculum fixed in advance in the hopes that it will
include something that will later be useful.” (Gershenfeld, 2005, p.7)
Gershenfeld claims that through these classes, the participating students were
inventing a new ‘physical notion of literacy’ that was much wider in scope than
the usual understanding of just reading and writing. Gershenfeld points out
that ‘making’ has been considered an 'illiberal art' since the Renaissance. He
reminds us the seven liberal arts (referring to the liberation brought through
their study) are composed of the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music) and the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric).
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