MakerCulture - Taking Things Into Our Own Hands

For twelve weeks in the fall of 2009, 45 students Online Journalism students at Ryerson University and the University of Western Ontario, under the direction of rabble board member Wayne MacPhail, worked together to document the evolving Maker Culture community.

Maker Culture? That’s coders, fabricators, foodies, artists, educators, activists, citizen and even scientists grabbing the Do-It-Yourself ethic with both hands and changing our world in the process.

These are people who aren't just making things, they're making a point of sharing what they've learned, what they've made, and why. Often, for free. Makers are responding directly, locally to globalization,commercialization, copyright and central command and control.

And, they're everywhere: building printers that can print themselves, mashing up music, doing science at home, changing their cities and countries, even imagining how we could print out our own organs. And nearly four dozen students caught up with the movement as it grew. Sometimes they even helped it grow. You'll see.

Each episode will contain a podcast on the rabble podcast network, video clips on the MakerCulture You Tube channel and a feature story right here on rabble.ca and, for the first time, co-published by our friends at thetyee.ca. Look for new episodes each week over the next three months.

This a feature series that is a series of firsts: The first time Ryerson and Western have worked together journalistically, the first time rabble.ca and thetyee.ca have co-published and the first time journalism students have used social media tools so completely from the very beginnings of a story.

You can see a diary of our progress here, at the Maker Culture blog we've built over the past three months: http://makingmakers.posterous.com

You can even look behind the scenes at the wiki (collaborative website) we used to create the series.
http://makerculture.pbworks.com/

Or, check out our photostream
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=makerculture&m=text

Or our You Tube channel
http://www.youtube.com/makerculture#g/u
It's all there because what we learned is, you work on a series like this, you learn a thing or two about how to be a maker yourself.

We hope you enjoy it.