“I am not a maker. If a framing and value system is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human”
The passage from which this quote is extracted resonated with me because I would like to go into the teaching field in the future and even before reading this passage, I’ve been questioning to what extent when someone teaches a particular course over and over again, they can create something new each time. I think that the quote is true if the teacher uses resources that other people have made while his/her job is to only make it easy for students to assimilate and understand these resources. However, if the resources(lecture notes, videos, etc…) have been designed by the teacher, then we could say that the teacher is indeed a maker; he/she can even sell these resources. In other words, they hold value in the same sense that an artifact has value. Perhaps the author is trying to argue that the mere act of “teaching” does not imply the creation of any tangible thing whatsoever, to which I can agree.
If I become a teacher, I will make sure to create as many things as possible, and they should be unique. I will create lecture slides with a lot of designs made my myself, videos of me explaining topics, etc… Taking this Digital Humanities course is showing me the power of using technology(for example Fusion 360 for making 3D models) to create artifacts; I will surely make use of this knowledge if I will be a teacher.
As this term just started and I’m a novice to Digital Humanities, I don’t know many of the areas of inquiry, methods or techniques, but based on what I’ve learnt till now, I can say that 3D modeling, as well as analyzing the statistics(such as seeing the frequency of a particular word in a book) in literature, as two things that I’m undoubtedly eager to pursue this term.
2 thoughts on “Reflection on “Why I’m not a maker””
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I hadn’t previously thought about the things we create in our everyday lives as artifacts, but it certainly makes sense to see them as such in regard to your chosen quote. I am curious about your thoughts on the value of new creation vs reusing old creation. If students only take a class once, is the value in creating new materials each time a benefit to them or the teacher, and is the frequent recreation of material equally valuable each time the class is taught, or is there a diminished return as the teacher becomes better and better at conveying certain information?
Like another commenter on this post, I wonder about the value of new creation versus reusing creation. I was also challenged by this article in reimagining the value of creation. Maybe reusing creations can be valuable. Maybe we don’t gain value from creating new things. So this raising the question of what things do we need to create anew and what things can we reuse in our creation. Especially in the specific scenario of teaching that you brought up.