Facilitating Online Distributed Critical Making: Lessons Learned

The global pandemic has brought numerous challenges for educators who take a maker-centered approach, whose instruction involves direct engagement with materials through collaborative and exploratory social interactions. Many educators have found creative ways to address the obstacles of being remote. However, inciting critical reflection through making, already difficult during in-person settings, has become an even greater challenge in remote settings. This paper reports on the lessons learned from a two-week online afterschool maker workshop where participants worked on a maker project being in remote locations, while engaged in critical reflections on ethical implications of biowearable devices. The results showed preliminary evidence that participants were able to produce a prototype and engaged in critical reflection on the ethical issues of biowearables. We also found that while online environments offer limited social cues and flexibility, access to multiple communication channels enabled just-in-time facilitation for critical reflection.