Vicki's blog

Technology is for Breaking

Vicki — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 18:24:54 +0000

We are delighted to feature a post from Carey Gibbons, one of the awesome librarians who tested out our maker kits during the Beta Phase. Carey is the Teen Programming Coordinator at Fondulac Distrcit Library in East Peoria, IL. Thanks for your wonderful work, Carey!

My library was lucky enough to participate in Make It @ Your Library’s pilot program for circulating various maker kits in the state of IL. FDL was the second library to test out the 3D printer kit, which was exciting and at first terrifying.

But first, a little bit about me. I am a full time employee at FDL in the position of teen programming coordinator. I do my best to provide programming for teens such as book clubs, craft projects, and a twice yearly study night. I admit to being reluctant when it came to STE(A)M programming. MaKey MaKey? Raspberry Pi? 3D printers? How was I supposed to teach teens how to use this stuff when I barely had a grasp on my own smartphone? I applied to the Make It @ Your Library pilot program anyway because figuring out how to use our maker kit was future Carey’s problem.

Future Carey quickly became present Carey as the 3D printer arrived at FDL. It was a slick looking Dremel and it came with a binder of instructions. I read this binder. It was intimidating. 3D printers were for engineers or high tech doctors. They were for making prosthetic limbs or printing food in space. Wait – could I print a pizza? This thing did look like an Easy Bake Oven. The instruction binder said not to put anything in the printer other than the plastic filament that was provided so pizza was out. But I turned it on, punched some buttons and the first thing we made at FDL was a slightly lumpy 20 sided die, the design of which had been preloaded onto an SD card that came with the printer.

Omg. We printed a thing. There was a thing in the printer that hadn’t been before and all we needed to do was press some buttons boop beep boop. This was easy! But it was still scary. I was constantly afraid that we were going to junk something up and break this very expensive piece of futuristic technology and that the consequences would be dire – FDL would be branded with the library equivalent of the Mark of Cain.

Well, we broke the printer.

Within a couple of days, we had managed to jam up the extruder (the heated nozzle where the filament comes out) from both the inside and outside and instead of printing recognizable things, the printer was just pooping hot filament all over the place. I spent some time on the phone with Dremel and they walked me through a number of steps in cleaning the extruder from the inside in three different ways. At first, my stomach was in knots. I was going to break it even more, I wasn’t doing it right, oh god technology is hard! But each time I cleaned the inside parts, it got less hard and less scary.

However, after three cleaning attempts, the extruder was still clogged up from the outside and I could not get the filament off of it without sharp objects. Dremel decisively told me not to do that. I took some pictures of the messed up extruder and sent them to the tech services person at Dremel who had been working with me. After a slight pause, she was like, “Yeah, this is bad. You need a new part. We’ll send you a new part with instructions on how to replace it.”

It was at this point that I contacted the folks at Make It @ Your Library with the news that we broke their printer and we needed a new part and I didn’t think I could fix it. Their response changed my whole outlook on programming and technology in general. It boiled down to, “That’s cool. Breaking stuff is cool. You’ve got this.”

I played in my high school’s orchestra as a kid. I got an MFA in creative writing as a slightly older kid. When it came to creative and fine arts, I was always told that if I was going to mess up, to do it big. But I had never applied this to real physical things. Botching a concert or taking a flawed story to workshop was how I learned to do better. Breaking the 3D printer and fixing it was also going to teach me to do better. And it would teach me to “be not afraid.” And it was going to teach me to pass this lesson on to young people – which I will get to in a second.

Dremel overnighted the replacement part with a thick packet of instructions and color photos. I rolled up my cardigan sleeves and got to work. I took apart the ruined extruder/motor/fan unit and replaced it with the new one. The printer was back in service by the end of the day. I had gone from a hot mess to totally confidant. I needed my Rosie the Riveter bandanna. Breaking a thing and taking apart its component parts goes a long way toward understanding a thing. The 3D printer is no longer magic, and that’s good. When you don’t understand a thing, it’s so much easier to fear.

But let’s circle back to the young people I’m supposed to be working with. To be honest, there was not a lot of interest in the 3D printer at FDL. We had a few patrons who were interested in seeing how it worked and I gave a few tutorials, but mostly staff made a lot of fun stuff to show off to each other. However, because of the 3D printer, I was invited to spend one night a week at the local high school helping students in the Maker Club build their own 3D printers. How cool is that?! Every week, about a dozen kids get together with help from River City Labs, the U of I Fab Lab, 4H, high school teachers, and FDL and work on making 3D printers.

Helping them with the mechanics of building is really cool. But it is hard. Very hard. This goes far beyond replacing a single part. These kids are doing this from scratch. And I hear a lot of negative stuff, especially from the young women involved. “I’m stupid.” “I can’t do this.” “What if I break it?” Young women don’t get a whole lot of encouragement with sciency/techy things. I mean in general – this program at the high school is spectacular! But I always counter these things I hear from them, “You’re not stupid. You can do this. See – you just did it! What if you break it? Well, let’s find out!”

Blog Tags:

3D Printing

Testing Assumptions: The first few steps of phase 2

Vicki — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:56:40 +0000

Make it @ Your Library has been fortunate enough to have been awarded a Prototype Fund Grant from the truly remarkable Knight Foundation. Honored is too weak of a word to describe how it feels to see our names on the same list as the other winners of the Knight News Challenge on Libraries. Phase 2 for Make it @ Your Library is going to be circulating maker tool kits, and the Knight Foundation has given us $35,000 and six months to make sense of how to do so.

But one interesting thing about the Prototype Fund that we've been made to understand is that it's not just likely but desirable that in June we will have ended up someplace different than we intended to be. The very nature of this grant seems to be based upon the fact that there aren't many opportunities in life to experiment without fear of disappointing those connected to your endeavor. Our team is going to legitimately try to create a prototype to circulate maker tool kits between libraries. We can't call this idea new -- there have been many types of physical kits circulated from a library before (even garden tool kits). And even amongst our colleagues in the Chicagoland area, there has been discussion and attempts at this.

But here's where it gets kind of interesting. The Knight Foundation has asked Prototype winners to test our assumptions. Yesterday our team met to do some preliminary sketching out of our project. And after a rousing, happy 20 minutes of the mechanics of how we might do this, we remembered about testing our assumptions.

Assumption #1: Do library staff want maker tool kits for their communities?

When you can see why something is a good idea, it's always a strange mix of infuriating, baffling, and defeating when other people do not. (The people who see your idea as not good probably feel similiarly about you, to be fair) Returning to the idea of Assumption #1: Librarians who are our professional friends are like-minded, but also a relatively homogenous sort of person, despite the variation in the libraries they work for. Make it @ Your Library feels relatively sure that if we brought up this idea to them, they'd be game. But what about library staff who are not like us? Does the idea of doing a program with Little Bits or 3Doodler Pens sound hellish to them, or intriguing?

This is one thing we're hoping to figure out. We also hope to show people who are a little fearful of the idea that the maker movement in libraries is fun, interesting and useful to our communities. Yesterday we began discussing the nitty-gritty of how.

The Art of Failure

Vicki — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 03:09:06 +0000

The team behind make it at your library came together through the ILEAD USA project in 2013. One of the mentors at the program, the marvelous Beck Tench, distilled this bit of wisdom from a group conversation:

Failure doesn't equal "It didn't go perfectly." Repeat to yourself over and over again.

It's become a bit of a mantra for me. When a program or an initiative doesn't work out, it's easy to take it personally, and hope that those missteps don't become a part of you. Creating an attitude toward new initiatives that includes room for getting it wrong is important. Making sure that you glean some understanding from what didn't work and then creating some theories about why and what you could do differently next time is crucial. (Honestly? They should teach a class on it in library school.)

Wonderfully, that's also what making is about. Learning by doing. No right answers, no wrong answers -- only something that works and functions after trial and error. That's tricky when there are patrons involved -- we don't want to look unprepared. That's trickier still when we have coworkers we want to impress, or at least preserve our dignity in front of -- we don't want to look like idiots. Repeat that mantra to yourself: "Failure doesn't equal it didn't go perfectly." Live it by finding a polite way to say it to stakeholders. Practice and practice again before you take it to patrons. Re-group, and try again.

No Magic Trick

Vicki — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 19:15:10 +0000

I have a new gig (as the Head of Youth Services at La Grange Public Library). But before I left my old gig (Lisle Library District), I agreed to do a program for the adult services department on duct tape. I didn't think much about it until about a week before the program actually came up. I mean, really. I've been programming for years (let's say over a decade) for kids. How different could it be to do a simple old craft program with adults? To quote Tina Fey, I breezed in "With the blithe confidence of a moron."

Well, turns out programming for adults is actually kinda different.

Here's the reason I work with kids: they are at the most enthusiastic part of life, and that is so much fun to be around and find ways to support. While you will occasionally bump into resistance when it comes to trying new things, kids will usually go with it. If something's not working, kids don't judge you too harshly. You just switch tactics and they're okay with it.

I walked in expecting pretty much the same attitude to that adult program, and it didn't go quite like that.

The patrons seemed happy enough to be there. We were making a Duct Tape Magic Wallet, and there were about 40 people there. I'd had the foresight to create a powerpoint with the step by step instructions up on the projector so nobody would get too lost, and people also had directions at the tables. The thing that struck me the most was that everybody was afraid to get it wrong. At the end of the program, even if it was a little ugly, everybody would have a magic wallet. They would have learned a little design trick that they could show a friend. At some point, I felt the energy of the room was kind of "cramped", for lack of a better word. I reminded everybody that there that nobody would fail the program, that there are no grades at the end. They chuckled and kept going, but only by walking around and encouraging folks on what they were trying to do did they eventually loosen up. If a step didn't go perfectly, or I didn't explain it "properly", it tended to lock people up.

A million things can make a program go off the rails. It may have been an off day, or might have been the wrong kind of program for the audience. It's hard to program without knowing your community, and though I'd worked at that library for 5 years, I couldn't have said that I really knew the adult population, just the kids. Looking back, here's what I think I'd have done differently:

* Limit to a smaller group. 40 adults is just too many for something so detailed. If we'd been doing an open art project or something, then it would have been fine for a larger group.

* Left an example on each table. This goes against all of my feelings toward process oriented art for kids, but for adults trying to create a very specific project, it's okay.

* Set the tone for the program right away as something just fun. When people get frustrated by something tricky, they have to redirect themselves. Let them know it's okay to mess up and try again.

And that's sort of what tinkering and making is all about. It's not about being perfect and getting it done right the first time. We make our way toward understanding and eventually, that tricky little design makes sense.

How do you turn this thing on?

Vicki — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 04:22:10 +0000

What turns a trend into a reality in libraryland? When do we go from thinking that we need to try something to actually writing up a description, making a plan, and putting it into our newsletters?

The answer is a concrete outline. Even if that outline involves you flying by the seat of your pants. It is from that cobbled together program outline from which you will eventually grow into an expert.

How exactly do you use makerprojects in your programming, though? How do you turn these vague ideas into a reality for your library?

Makerspaces, content creation, and the grand scheme of things

Vicki — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:33:02 +0000

In the building and creating of this site and project, there have been moments when I've asked myself if this whole thing works. Just because makerspaces are a thing, should they be our thing?

The short answer, to the team at Make it @ Your Library is a firm yes. Here's the how and the why:

Makerspaces are amazing, but they're not necessarily feasable for libraries in terms of space, budget, time and staffing. Maker elements and projects, though, are totally within our reach, and that's what this site is aiming to connect library professionals to. While the term "maker" is quite the trendy little buzzword, to us it really boils down to content creation. Empowering our communities to use the library to create things is another way to build the library's relevancy. Creating opportunities for library users to make something that didn't exist before strengthens the importance of the old "third space" concept.

By incorporating maker projects into your programming, reaching out to local maker groups to offer your space, or even setting up passive maker projects at a table or meeting room, you are distilling the very best of the maker movement for your patrons: empowerment.

And fun. Did we mention fun?