Hi Deborah,

Good questions...I would say that each year we have worked with less experienced people-who-make (Y1-adults who do it for a living, Y2-youth with varying amounts of experience, and Y3-a high school classroom where many youth had relatively little experience-especially in school) so in that way the lines have become less knotted. However in year 2, youth were working intensively with each other and their mentors and so those knots, particularly over the span of a single project, were more entangled than what the adults were doing in Y1, when maybe they would check in with others, get advice, and go back on their way. In Year 2, youth were constantly interacting with their own college mentors, with information from different places (e.g. adafruit, youtube videos) and with different adults. So the other thing I think we need to be thinking about is the idea of time (and meshworks) as multiscalar.

Hi Rowena, 

Well, we debate whether fundraising is a literacy or not, but it certainly is a genre of literate practice. And then there are sub-genres. For instance, many makers make something that other people think is cool and then the maker realizes maybe they have something marketable and become  entrepreneurs through crowdfunding sources like kickstarters. Creating a kickstarter is its own kind of genre. As one of our participants put it, he came to realize that kickstarter was really about learning how to tell the story of your product. At the informal youth site we studied that is in the video, they have groups of teens kick off projects with "kickstarters," or pitches, telling the story of their project to a panel of "industry experts." At the high school, we have offered students the option of creating a "kickstarter" as part of a final assessment. There are other genres for sharing as well that students have done including how-tos as videos posted on youtube and as posts on instructables.com, a site dedicated to such things. We have not concluded the year, so we'll see!

Hi Lisa,

Right now, we need to analyze all this data! We will share results in a way that has implications for teachers. So, we hope to be working with teachers on a broader scale and looking more closely at teacher learning. We'd also love to go back and reanalyze the year one space through the lens of meshworking. As you can tell by our representations in the video, this idea is emergent for us, but we think it can be robust for arguing the importance of relationship building with young people.

Thank you, Katie! We have learned a lot from you and your colleagues at MSU and UNC Greensboro!

We're very interested in this idea of sharing knowledge and expertise in making spaces and activities. Given the multimodal and multidisciplinary ways of working in making spaces, the range of skills and knowledge necessary to complete complex projects is often outside of one's own expertise. So, these spaces are well-suited for the sharing of knowledge, skill, and perspective among participants. We argue making spaces present opportunities for meshworks to knot together lines of youth’s lives: family, religion, crafting, school; and domains of expertise within hybrid activities like making. By creating representations of the meshworks existing in these spaces, we aim to support youth in developing personal infrastructures along which ideas, knowledge, and expertise can travel and be shared with others, both within these spaces and in other spaces in youth's lives.

Hi Minjung,

Yes, we see it as a support for youth and also as a analytic frame for analyzing their interactions with others and information seeking practices. What do you mean by different "kinds of networks?"  I think depending on the strength of relationships, proximity, and goals different meshworks are formed. Certainly in my professional life I also tend to develop relationships with a few people that I go back to over and again. I also tend to privilege those who I hold in higher esteem. I think this translates to the classroom as well. We've found that students tend not to take advice from people who they don't think are as knowledgeable as they are. And in the case in the video, the team would often ignore the advice of the college mentor who you see describing how to power the LED. When an older, retired, and male engineer would say the same thing, the high school youth would follow his advice and the college mentor would throw up her hands in disgust.