Yesterday I attended the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Manchester, NH. The New Hampshire School Library Media Association is one of the collaborators in offering this conference to school library employees. I thought the conference sounded interesting, but I couldn't afford the $165 price tag, so when the call went out to have people present projects in the Collaborative Makerspace, I proposed my project. It was accepted, so I got an awesome day of professional development.
I arrived to the expo center in time to grab a little cup of granola (with chocolate chips), and then I immediately went to get a seat for the keynote address. That day's speaker was Adam Bellow, the co-founder of Breakout EDU. For those not familiar with it, Breakout EDU is an immersive learning in which students are put into a room together, and given some clues which they must decipher in a certain order, so that they can "break out" of the room. The adult escape rooms based on this concept are also gaining popularity.
The keynote speech was fantastic, and I took quite a few notes. I was a little unsure about how my little project was going to fit into the scene, amidst all the robots and drones and coding programs. The project I proposed is one of my favorites; using discarded books to create unique art journals. It's very easy, and the possibilities are endless. Plus, libraries are always trying to figure out what to do with the mountains of withdrawn books we create when we 'weed' our collections. So I thought it might be appealing to librarians, but I kind of pictured myself tucked away in a corner with all my musty old books, while all the 'shiny new toys' were centerstage.
When I arrived at my station to set up for my two hour shift of volunteering in the makerspace, I had just sat down when the woman at the next table turned to me and asked "Are those your journals?" I replied "Yeah" and she said "Oh, they're beautiful! I was just looking at them!" And then it took off. From that point on, anyone who visited the makerspace wanted to look at them, and ask how to do them, and if I've used them with students before. . .I've never had so many people look through my journals before, but I was showing them different techniques, and telling them about some fun prompts to use in order to get started. . .They were taking pictures of the pages, and asking me for my email address in case they have questions, and asking me for the address of my blog. . .It was incredible!
When there was some downtime, I just worked on some pages in the art journals.
I've written here before about my reluctance to identify myself as an artist. I have always thought of artists as people with MFA's, or people who are paid to teach art to students, or as people who rent studio space in renovated industrial buildings. . . like, "Me? No, I don't make art. I just glue things onto paper, or spread paint on surfaces or attach broken jewelry bits to things to make windchimes."
I guess I just need to remember that just like librarians do not simply "read books all day" that artists have much more to their identity, and "makers" make all varieties of things.
I think I need one of these flags, like the one I saw at the conference:
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