Planning
What I would like the microteach to achieve for my peers
I was reading a New York Times article about a UK-based collective called Looty who work on the digital repatriation of cultural artefacts. In 2021, Looty conducted a ‘digital heist’ to create a scan of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, with the aim of using AR to re-situate it back in Rashid, Egypt.
Inspired by this, I considered leveraging everyday cognitive artifacts (Norman, 1991) to shape the perception of technology as a tool for liberatory education. I wanted to use the mobile phone as the object, showcasing it as a medium through which we can create meaningful and equitable learning experiences.
How I intend to run the microteach
I would like my session to be tailored to the group in their role as educators. I will use slides, partly because I don’t have an object per se, but also to help me structure the session. I’d like the group to interact with each other so I will include a few pair-based discussion-based prompts. I want the group to use their phones to create a digital representation of a physical object using Polycam, a 3D scanning app. My timed session plan can be found in the ‘Slides‘ section at the bottom of this blog.
Reflection
I remember being very sweaty, although I’m not sure if that was nerves or the fact that the radiators in T11.02 were blasting!
I should have included some structured instructions on how to use Polycam as well as including some guidance about what objects lend themselves best to 3D scanning. The group was accommodating despite this and it was great to see everyone get stuck in and move around the room scanning various objects.
Lindsay’s feedback summed up my session’s aim: using apps to perceive objects differently, focusing not on the objects themselves but on our varied interpretations. The majority of the other feedback focussed around preparing for scenarios where the tech wasn’t working, or wasn’t available. Preparing low-bandwidth versions of activities is something I will do in future practice and is best practice for inclusive design.
What I learned from the other sessions
During the afternoon, I sewed a plastic fan, used a traditional Ghanaian fan (very welcomed in the sauna-room), re-enacted how a stem stitch would walk/talk, helped to construct a paper theatre and created a cave painting using a chicken bone and horse-hair brush! It was interesting to hear how my colleagues faced challenges doing object-based learning online, for instances Faust mentioned that students weren’t able to recognise the scale of set designs in AutoCAD versus in person.
What resonated with me the most from the afternoon was how tactile the sessions were. [Edit: I’m reading Addison’s Doubting Learning Outcomes and he says “within art and design, haptic knowledge (that accessible primarily through touch) is of primary importance in some disciplines”. (Addison, 2014)]
It was fascinating to reflect on how ‘embodied’ everyone’s session was. There is perhaps something to be said about thinking how we can recreate such object-based learning experiences online but maybe now isn’t the time to think about it 🙂
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References
Addison, N. (2014) ‘Doubting Learning Outcomes in Higher Education Contexts: from Performativity towards Emergence and Negotiation’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 33(3), pp. 313–325. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12063.
Norman, D. A. (1991) Cognitive artifacts. In Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface (pp. 17-38). Cambridge University Press.
Tattoli, C. (2023) A ‘Digital Heist’ Recaptures the Rosetta Stone. The New York Times. [online] 11 Aug. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/arts/looty-rosetta-stone-benin-bronzes.html.
Slides