So the new semester has begun, and I'm doing two subjects (although at RMIT they're called "courses" - it's all very confusing), Information Project Management and Digital Curation. Digital Curation is fairly straightforward; it's looking at how digital information can be stored, how it should be maintained, and we're also looking at issues such as obsolescence. Hopefully it's going to be quite interesting.
My other subject, Information Project Management, is going to be a bit more complicated. We have a semester-long assignment, where we have to design a MakerSpace for the council area of Brimbank in Melbourne, and then write a tender to apply for grant money, costing the whole scheme as we go. It's going to be a lot of stuff that I'm not used to, especially they costing part of it (I've always been fairly terrible at Maths).
A MakerSpace is a community area, often in a library but it can be anywhere else, that is targeted towards the idea of 'making' things, often using equipment that is too expensive for personal ownership. The MakerSpace can be used for various things, like electronics, craft, technology. The aim of the MakerSpace is to encourage learning and creativity, and it can have other advantages, like community assimilation and skill development. It's quite a trendy idea at the moment.
Our groups current idea is to have a drone building MakerSpace, targeted to teenage and just out of school age youth type people. Apparently there are kits that you can buy so that you can build your own, and so the plan is to have group work, making simple drones that you can fly around. Originally our ideas were very wispy, like a craft workshop, or a cooking centre, but with this plan, we can make a quite specific response to the assignment.
Some links to MakerSpaces information:
