Benjamin Franklin as an apprentice

Last week’s post posited that at its core, the wide toolbox framework is a type of self-directed apprenticeship that constitutes a long game mind-set. It is prima facie evidence of a student’s desire and ability to learn across diverse academic disciplines and fields of knowledge. This approach to positioning yourself, like a golfer who is engaged in course management, suggests that a student is questioning the traditional academic paradigm where focus on a major transforms into a career. This self-directed learning experience is disruptive of the conventional approach to higher education: it challenges the conventional silo paradigm in academia. The wide toolbox framework, moreover, is for students who desire the ability to combine an understanding of the feasibility of a product or service (technology), focus on human intention or need (the humanities), and financial viability and sustainability (entrepreneurship). Fundamental to this self-directed apprenticeship is the compelling need of how to do college better given the dual reality of an interconnected global economy, and the challenge of having trained leaders for the 21^st century knowledge workforce.

Learning skills to create, build, invent, or innovate is an inherent part the wide toolbox framework. In fact, the espirit de corps of the wide toolbox cohort is their curiosity and desire to make things. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, asserted in Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, “Physical products are increasingly just digital information put in physical form by robotic devices such as CNC mills.” “This information,” Anderson continues, “is a design, translated into instructions to automated production equipment.”

In an early post on this blog, it was noted that there were two major tribes pursuing entrepreneurship at Yale: the atoms and the bits.

During the course of an interview an informant made the comment that he operates with or manages atoms, as compared to the people in other parts of the entrepreneurship village who operate with or manage bits and bytes. This informant’s worldview of entrepreneurship is informed by innovating through the creation of physical artifacts in the real world, as compared to innovating through the creation of digital information in the on-line or virtual world. This way of thinking about innovation is instructive for me because it lends a perspective to how to think about innovators and designers. Much of the discussion in the press about entrepreneurship centers around businesses based on bits and bytes. For sociological analysis of groups and individuals these distinctions might work, but I believe that many innovations are hybrids. They are based on atoms, something tangible, something you can touch, but they run on software based on bits and bytes, something intangible.

Because the wide toolbox cohort is learning skills on their own and applying them to make things from bits and atoms they have kindred spirits in the Maker movement. Because of the comprehensiveness of an e-mail I received concerning the making of a maker, I thought that it would be informative to share an edited version here:

• Hand-in-hand with the development of the wide-toolbox is the presentation of the expanded maker-skills on one’s resume. There is a yet-to-be-fully-documented shift in resume formats with the new flavor telling “what you made” as a standard entry. A recent Yale graduate has an applicable “lesson from the trenches story.” The aero-space company where he was interviewing, asked him to redo his standard resume, and highlight what he made. This fall, we will host a resume workshop on how to update your resume to include things you have made.
• The maker-on-your-college-application trend combined with the maker-on-your-resume trend is a strong indicator of the need to add making skills to the list of required skills (thereby joining some of the well-established skills of communications, leadership, technical knowledge, and critical thinking).
• Regarding the “preparing the maker” storyline, a bit of evidence that this is a “beyond Yale” thing is the growing number of places that have or are preparing “academic maker spaces” (including the number of visitors to the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) that are interested in our work. And on the high school level, two New York City high schools plus one upstate New York high school have visited CEID. There is even a thread of libraries-to-maker-spaces movement at various colleges (with a sub-thread of all libraries). There are existing high school models that are doing this as well, including our community’s high school. Also, colleges are coming on-line giving making its due credit with regards to admissions. Also Martin Culpepper’s new position at MIT is a demonstration of this phenomenon crossing over into academic leadership/organization. Woodie Flowers has been pushing this approach to learning for 30+ years. See the TedX Talk by Woodie.

This e-mail makes the point that being a maker is an identifiable talent that is in demand in the workplace, as well as on high school and college campuses. Combining the theoretical with the hands-on experience of creating, building, inventing or innovating things is a way to differentiate yourself from the preponderance of students who continue to take the path of trying to transform a conventional college major into a 21^st century career.

Whether you are in STEM or the humanities, you might benefit from attending a workshop on how to update your resume to include things you have made. In future posts I will be returning to this topic of resume presentation.