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Cory in Redondo Beach today Clothes made from vintage kids' sheets Scenes from an LA mall New Order live, yesterday and in 1981 Cory in Redondo Beach today
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 07, 2012 11:00 am Yo, Redondo Beach! You're my last west coast stop on this leg of the Pirate Cinema tour, and I'll be at Mysterious Galaxy today at 2:30PM (I'll be back on this coast later to visit Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle). Tomorrow, I'll be in Lansing, MI, before a multi-day Chicagoland extravaganza. The tour has stops in ...
Read in browser Clothes made from vintage kids' sheets
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 07, 2012 08:34 am One of my favorite shirts of all time is a Western shirt made partly from recycled Star Wars sheets, just like the ones I had as a boy. In that vein, I offer you BongaChopShop on Etsy, where you will find a wide variety of dresses, bags, etc, made from other brightly colored kids' sheets ...
Read in browser Scenes from an LA mall
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 06, 2012 08:24 pm I'm in LA for the Pirate Cinema tour this weekend, and my publisher's rep is taking me around to local stores to sign their stock between the public events. Today we found ourselves in a mall in Glendale, which featured pureed cupcake beverages and signs warning chihuahua owners about escalators. America! Heck yeah! (Thanks to ...
Read in browser New Order live, yesterday and in 1981
By David Pescovitz on Oct 06, 2012 04:12 pm I caught the revitalized New Order (sans Peter Hook) at Oakland's Fox Theatre last night and I must say, they were fantastic. Tight, rocking, passionate, and they looked genuinely delighted to be playing such a thrilled, packed venue. Here is New Order perfomring Ceremony, not yesterday but 31 years ago.
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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