Hi! I am Niels

My background is in Educational Sociology and teaching. I work at the VIA University College in Denmark. It is 1 University College, but located on 7 different Campusses, 11 locations all in all. Every location has a makerspace and I am managing the program for those makerspaces.

Most of my job is about coordination and administration, but I also do workshops (online and onsite) on digital fabrication and design processes and I have developed content for an E-learning platform that we use in our makerspaces. My departement is called: Businessrelations and Entrepreneurship. The University has studyprogrammes within engineering, health sciences, design, education, business and much more. Among many other things we want the makerspaces to be cross-curricular learning environments for all of our studyprogrammes.

I have been following the FabAcademy programme (on-and-off), since I first heard of it from some of my colleagues back in 2009, - I guess it was. Along with that I was projectmanager on the fablab@school project in the municipality of Aarhus. A project that was based in Stanford at that time with Paolo Blikstein as a keyperson. I worked with the “maker-perpective” on a municipality level focusing on K-12.

Now its become possible for me to participate in FabAcademy 2024 and I am quite excited about that. Although I have to divide my time 50/50 between my workplace and the FabAcademy. One perspective for me is to bring home ideas and plans on how to further integrate ”making” in all (or most of them) of our programmes in some way and form. I would like to make the “how to make (almost) anything” approach accessible for everyone - and in some sense easier - maybe through a supplementary focus on the soft skills that also are needed when you build, create and learn with/ through technology.

Understanding (future) jobs in a digitized and techdriven world through a hands- on approach is something for everyone I believe – something very basic – a part of a general education (Bildung). Making stuff , being playful about it, should be at the core of this.

I dont consider myself being an expert in anything, more as someone who knows a little bit about a lot of things. And it has been a while since I have been a student/learner, but I really look foreward to learn more about all of the things that the FabAcademy stands for.