What's the Point of a Maker Faire?

Guests: Nathan Robison, Programming Librarian, Orem Public Library; Matt Kammerer, Media Associate, Orem Public Library In libraries and schools and warehouses around the country, spaces are popping up where people can come and use 3-D printers, high-end computer software and lots of gadgets to make stuff. Back when I was in high school, we had a sewing lab and a wood shop that attracted students with an itch to create. Today’s “makerspaces,” as they’re called, are similar, but usually more high-tech. A little later this hour, we’ll meet the man who coined the term “makerspace” and started Make Magazine more than a decade ago.

Guest: Dale Dougherty, Founder, CEO, Make Magazine and Maker Faire, Author, “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs and Our Minds” Makerspaces like the one we just visited at the Orem Public Library are in libraries and schools around the country today. A decade ago, that was not so.  But, tech journalist Dale Dougherty saw it coming and was the first to call it “making.” He started Make Magazine: the latest issue has instructions on how to build a retro arcade game or hack apart a piano to build a new instrument. Check out the Magazine here.

Guest: John Broich, PhD, Associate Professor of British Empire History, Case Western Reserve University, Author, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” Many years after the U.S. and England banned the transport of enslaved people across the Atlantic, and America tore itself to pieces in civil war to end slavery, an active slave trade was still going on in the Indian Ocean on the other side of Africa. But that was so far away it was essentially “out of sight, out of mind” for Americans and many British, too. Those who did know of it couldn’t agree on what to do about it. Some hoped it would peter out naturally. Others, including a Royal Navy commodore named Leopold Heath, believed England had a duty to use all of its military might to end the trade of kidnapped Africans as slaves. So, he assembled a squadron of ship captains and they took it upon themselves.