Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

4 minute read

Writing this early on a Monday morning. It’s still dark outside but there’s no snow yet in Kamloops. That feels weird to me, but it’s also starting to feel normal. Apparently there isn’t snow yet up north where I grew up, and in my memory there was always snow by Halloween.

There’s a week left in the semester, so everything that is going to get done this year is already in process and anything else just isn’t.

projects

Coyote Grant

  • The Makerspace’s Coyote Grant was approved. This is a small grant that will help us support Indigenous-led workshops in Makerspace by providing supplies and honorariums as well as let us provide food during welcome events for Indigenous students. Part of the grant will go to sponsor the Student Inter-Cultural Club running 2 workshops in the space, and part will be used to run other workshops. We’ve already partnered with Office of Indigenous Education on two Moccasin Making workshop and we ran a “Bannock and Beat Saber” event early in the semester (planned largely by two of my student assistants, Melissa and Cicyetkwu). It takes awhile to see the impact of these events, and so I am grateful to have that time now.

Environmental Collaboration discussion

  • I’m part of a University-funded initiative to find ways to bring together faculty working on environmental issues. Early in the semester the organizers brought a bunch of us together to work on priority setting, and one of the top priorities was “Using creativity to engage with environmental concerns/issues/solutions.” Myself and 2 colleagues from Visual Arts and Business have now been asked to lead a discussion this week about how to make this happen.

Sustainability Grant

  • Everything we want for the tool library has been purchased and the catalogers are just finishing getting things ready to lend out. We will launch in January. We need to do some staff training and plan for promotion, but it’s good to see this part of the project coming to a conclusion. Two of our staff, Valentine and Olivia, along with the cataloging library technician have done a huge amount of work to make this happen.
  • Increasing Student Group Use: Still processing information from the open house event we led with the student union two weeks ago about how we can help student groups run their own programming in the Makerspace. Hoping to get a summary to attendees out this week and turn that into a blog post.
  • Fiber bank: on hold for now.

Updating Program Description and Code of Conduct

  • It’s been almost 2 years since we opened and I am finally ready to create a cohesive program description for Makerspace. This will define what we are (and therefore aren’t) and will help us avoid scope creep. At the same time I want to make some slight modifications to our Code of Conduct. Both of these will take time, as they need to go through our Team for more discussions (this week), then to my faculty colleagues in our Department, and then to our Faculty Council. In each case people need more that one meeting, so it will be February before they are ready to be voted on, but getting final feedback starts this week.

Not a lot this week.

Way back in 1984, Kranzberg was optimistic. “Leaders in all fields are increasingly turning to historians of technology for expertise regarding the nature of the sociotechnical problems facing them,” he said. I wish I could write that today. I’m not an historian, of technology or otherwise, but I’ve spent decades studying public policy, and I believe passionately that public affairs should be informed by history. And from my perspective, I see news media and other public forums dominated by people whose historical awareness runs no deeper than the Clinton administration, legislatures full of people whose knowledge of history encompasses all the movies of Tom Hanks, technology giants run by people who think modern history began when Steve Jobs founded Apple, and a public whose ignorance of history makes it vulnerable to tech-driven stock bubbles — hello, crypto — as well as nostalgia and the demagogues who feed on it. “The History of Technology Is Most Relevant”

That outcome seems preferable to the world we now find ourselves in, where AI safety folks have been made to look like laughingstocks, tech giants are building superintelligence with a profit motive, and social media flattens and polarizes the debate into warring fandoms. OpenAI’s board got almost everything wrong, but they were right to worry about the terms on which we build the future, and I suspect it will now be a long time before anyone else in this industry attempts anything other than the path of least resistance OpenAI’s Alignment Problem

But, what I try to do in the book is to say: I don’t really think making a bigger tent is really quite the right metaphor here. Because people with disabilities have been way out in front in actually reinventing and re-imagining the built world in so many ways. So, in other words, instead of that, let’s make a bigger tent and not forget, I’d rather you see this rich kind of estuary, this incredible ecosystem of remaking the world in artifacts that make more bodies more expressed and more able to get into the world. And more richly varied! I am trying to say: if you pause and look, your wonder might be activated by this incredible flesh envelope that’s making its way through the world. Its inherent adaptation. New Stuff

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