As part of my work on pedagogical innovation for the HEAD, I have been working with various technical pools on a series of tutorials.

For anyone who's paying attention, there is a new pedagogue in town: YouTube. People are now successfully learning carpentry, metalwork, ceramics, 3D printing, computer programming, video production, fly fishing, cooking, et cætera, et cætera, ad nauseum. But more importantly for me, is that people are starting to learn how to integrate all of this knowledge into actionable projects — making or restoring entire houses with 90% of the basic training from watching YouTube videos.

That is just one example, and the potential list is near-infinite. There really is a maker revolution going on over at youtube.

All professors and administrators from art schools should have already started paying attention to this trend for quite some time now. In many ways, these tutorials are already integrated into our work: go into any atelier and you will quickly find a student learning some basic tips from a YouTube short. But instutitions are slow to shift structurally to such fundamental changes, with some teachers faster, some slower, and others ready to burn the whole building down before they'll share their knowledge online. And it is also a very bad idea® to entirely transfer your institutional knowledge to a vaccum-cleaner-machine-designed-for-capitalist-knowledge-capture. So yes, it's all a mess. But change is afoot, nevertheless.

So the idea was to dip our toes into this evolution, since we are of course a place of pedagogical transmission of skills which by design are then matched with historical, theoretical, conceptual, and methodological training-by-doing. This sort of learning is of course somewhat harder to replicate on Web platforms, but give them time, and they will start to eat into this space as well.

As it turns out, the most important ingredient to a good tutorial is the writing phase. This was the hardest part for each atelier: how to break down the instructions into the most essential elements to get you up and running, and leave all the extra details for a later date, once you are ready to perfect your craft. Based on these discussions, I build a spreadsheet template that we use still to this day to break down a difficult-to-teach concepts into their essential components.

  • Mélange plâtre
  • Atelier: CERCCO
  • Moulage plâtre
  • Atelier: CERCCO
  • Scie à Ruban
  • Atelier: Bois
  • CNC Préparation Fichiers Illustrator
  • Atelier: Bois
  • Métal Tronçonneuse
  • Atelier: Métal
  • Métal Couple d'angle
  • Atelier: Métal