My head is still scattered so, at this stage, thoughts on #KiwiFoo 2013 are best expressed by others (although I can just about stretch to a wee spot of curation)…..check out my Storify collection for a flavour of this rich unconference. Massive thanks and hat-tips to Nat Torkington, Janine Torkington, the hard-working crew, Mahurangi College, the sponsors, the participants, & my fab mate Claire….
[http://storify.com/virtuallykaren/kiwifoo2013]
I’m not quite ready to synthesise the goodness and bring it home to work or passions. I need some sleep first. But until then…..
grab-bag of take-aways / ponderings / wonderings….
- There is huge value in bringing together people from cross-disciplines – science, politics, education, tech, community, social. Throwing yourself in gains usually hard-to-grab opportunities to meet, connect with and learn from others who I would never had a chance to meet.
- The ‘so what’ of how people apply their skills: connections to the community, giving back, paying forward are what turns potential navel-gazing into meaningful projects.
- the value of immersive, hands-on learning (thinking here of the prototyping and robot-making sessions, as well as walking-the-talking in the collaboration across companies session) – the power of physical data visualisation
- The Makerspace movement as a pathway for learning – and prototyping, using methodologies from Stanford, to generate ideas through empathy
- ‘A Pattern Language: Towns. Buildings. Construction’ by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein – and the concept of pattern language within educational professional learning and practice
- John Seddon and his thinking about the service industry – what would this look like in an educational context or in the way we develop organisations as systems?
- The open research movement and its potential to enhance participatory / action research / critical theory models as well as revolutionise the way in which we ‘judge’ quality, crowdsource new hypotheses and generate relevant questions.
- Stunning ideas to explore: Chalkle, Innocentive and PledgeMe (crowdsourcing), Ministry of Awesome (Christchurch), Goodreads (great books via social networking), Stone Soup (storytelling), finite and infinite games…
…..and there is another list of stuff I can’t get to right now….another time….
karen spencer 
Hi! I’m attending Webstock at the end of this week and will be in Christchurch after that. Any tech meetups or gatherings that would be worth checking out?
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Hi Daniel – thanks for stopping by:-) Can’t comment on good events to go to – but keep an eye on the #webstock hashtag on Twitter – you’ll pick up a few ideas (and there’s the party at the end, too;-) Enjoy! (very envious that you’re going *sigh*)
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Hi Karen, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the event. Still digesting my own interactions with interesting folk. Really liked your education talk too. Will need to come back at that topic in more detail with you sometime.
Would also like to share our site http://Makers.org.nz which we use to serve the Maker community across NZ as-well as sharing cool projects and facilitating discussion.
We’ll be undergoing a makeover in Autumn( the kiwi one 🙂 ) which will see us re-launching our forums and some other neat services such as the Maker Academy.
Cheers!
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Hi Richard, Thanks for taking the time to leave such a lovely comment – t’was fabulous to meet you. Conversations never long enough:-) Happy to on-share links to the Maker community, and I’m hoping to get to the Makertorium in April. Woots!
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