Group items tagged

"What's a FabLab@School? A FabLab is a low-cost digital workshop equipped with laser-cutters, routers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, and programming tools, where you can "make almost anything." There are over 50 FabLabs around the world, open to local inventors, small businesses, and garage entrepreneurs.The FabLab concept was created by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld at MIT. Despite the potential impact of FabLabs in education, they are mostly focused on adults, entrepreneurship, and product design. The FabLab@School, created by Prof. Paulo Blikstein at Stanford University is a new type of digital fabrication lab especially designed for schools and children, with several special characteristics. "

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces. Perhaps more than any other sector, postsecondary education is being affected by changing demand as the learning needs and preferences of the individual consumer rapidly evolve. Increasingly, individuals need both lifelong learning and accelerated, on-demand learning, largely as a response to the pressures of the broader evolving economic landscape. Rarely seen amid gross national statistics on the skills gap, employability, completion rates, and tuition hikes is a serious discussion of the unmet, and increasingly disparate, needs and expectations of individual learners. The costs to the individual are increasing, and the payoff is less certain. Students of all ages are more comfortable with technology and are less tied to traditional notions of the academy as fewer American adults between the ages of 18 and 22 achieve a four-year, full-time, campus-based degree.1 At the same time, technological advances reduce the lifespan of specific skills, and an increasingly globalized and automated workforce needs to continuously learn and retrain."