ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the effort to develop a highly participatory, collaborative, reflective, inquiry-based maker making and massive open online courses (MOOC). It discusses how people leveraged the MOOC platform to inspire active tinkering, provide responsive pedagogy, and create a reflective and collaborative community of learners. The Maker Movement has a grassroots, hacker culture that, at the Exploratorium Tinkering Studio, has been squarely focused on physical materials and scientific phenomena, communities of learning and collaboration, and open-ended inquiry-based learning. The nature of the interactions within the Tinkering Studio are physical, personal, collaborative, and engaging in ways that take full advantage of real tools, real materials, direct interaction with scientific phenomena, and the social aspect of people working together and side by side others engaged in similar activity. The experiences that are serve as the fodder for reflective professional dialogue, whether in-person or online, continue to be the most important asset to their own learning and development of educational practice with others.
