Makers, take note.
Let’s be clear. This is NOT an attack on teachers. That’s because teachers are being pushed hard to focus on standardized, multiple-choice tests.
But as the national Gallup organization points out, we should care about this because “Hope, engagement and well being of students accounts for one third of the variance of student success. Yet schools don’t measure these things. Hope, for example, is a better predictor of student success than SAT scores, ACT scores, or grade point average.” * Gallup found that from elementary to secondary school, student engagement drops from 76 percent to 44 percent. —Hometown Source.
Broadly speaking, “makers” are a do-it-yourself arty/crafty/geeky/techno subculture. In the digital humanities, a “maker” emphasizes getting students to create and share content with digital tools, rather than, for example, assigning a digital textbook and thus ask students to treat a computer as a tool for consuming somebody else’s pre-packaged content.
What’s a “Maker?”