MakeZine.com from O’Reilly Media, and Instructables.com from SQUID Labs
MAKE: Technology on Your Time and MAKEZine.com from O’Reilly Media are for the dedicated technophile who’s got a sense of humor. According to the front page, “Make is Popular Mechanics redone for the age of blogs, Linux and laptops. The articles are mostly how-to pieces for decidedly cool undertakings, like taking a cabinet-style turntable from the 1940s, the sort that was a piece of living-room furniture, and turning it into an MP3 encoder for LP albums. Make has considerable coffee-table appeal, meaning you don’t have to actually build anything to enjoy leafing through it. Some of the projects are vaguely tongue-in-cheek anyway, like building an electric guitar out of a cigar box.”
On MAKEZine.com you’ll find an e-mail newsletter subscription service for alerts and upcoming issue information, and some RSS, Atom and podcast feeds for the MAKE:Blog and MAKE:Projects.
The MAKE:Projects URL takes you to Instructables.com, developed the folks at SQUID Labs, as a collaborative “convenient system for documenting our how-to projects, and the things we make ….”
Interesting to me is that in the developers’ explanation of how they came to build their own system, they make no mention of any of the extensive theory and work behind distance education and online learning. Granted that hobbyists and others who tinker and build things and want to share their knowledge and learn from others don’t necessarily want to learn in a structured, online environment, but perhaps there are some principles from these systems that could be applied within the Instructables site. I’ll leave that issue to the online educators.
Source, “LibraryBot“, The Shifted Librarian, 02005 12 13
