hurray! for SOTL

I am heartened in the 6 years or so since I undertook the GCUT at UoM (really that long?) that my understanding of, and fascination in, SOTL has continued to grow. Coming back to this field through undertaking EDUC90970, from a ‘virtual teaching and learning'(or SOTEL: Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning), I am also interested to see how the scholarship of this field has advanced, at the same rate (not unexpectedly ) as the scholarship around tertiary museum pedagogy, and now embraces digital learning. Advancing on Boyer’s contentions in 1990 (Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate) where he challenged the existing singular dichotomy between teaching and research, and promoted a more complex understanding the scholarship of teaching and learning as a field in its own right, researchers in the field of SOTL now work in a clear framework – albeit a nuanced and multifarious one. I love a framework!

The process of SOTL, leading directly (ideally) to an ‘enhancement of students’ experience of learning’ (Haigh) has turned out to be essential in my work with students in museum contexts. The question of ‘why should we be interested?’ posed by Haigh, relates directly to me through the driver he describes as ‘personal circumstances, interests and capabilities’:

Is there some aspect of teaching and learning that I am really interested in and want to investigate further?
• Do I think I can change and improve my own and others’ teaching through SoTL?
• Am I confident about my research capabilities, including ‘doing’ SoTL?
• Am I confident about my teaching but ready to investigate it?
• Given other demands in my academic and personal life, is there space for engaging in SoTL?



All of the above points feel important to me personally, particularly as I have recently returned to a role in the University that is 100% focused on academic engagement (rather than about 20% as has been the case for the past 4 years). I need to rebuild my confidence as a researcher in this field of SOTL, where I genuinely believe I can create new scholarship that will directly influence the outcome for students as learners… and for that, theoretical frameworks are crucial.

One area in Haigh’s article that has been very valuable is nuancing my understanding of pedagogical research and SOTL. Haigh, drawing on a number of other scholars, identify critical reflection as a key factor in the practice of SOTL, as well as the specificity of the research (rather than the more generalised research that characterises pedagogy). In other words, it is ideal to focus on your own disciplinary (or in my case, domain-specific) context, and this exploration may eventually evolved into more generalised pedagogical research. Haigh sees overlap, rather than clear-cut difference, between pedagogical research and SOTL. I love the way Haigh talks about ‘integrative scholarship’ as necessary to sustain the SOTL community of practice… This resonates so beautifully with my primary strategy for conducting SOTL in university museums…get a fabulous and multidisciplinarily diverse group of academics on side…and GO FOR IT!

The Fabric Culture exhibition at the Grainger Museum was an outcome of an academic engagement with Interactive Composition and Animation academics Paul Fletcher and Dr Anthony Lyons, and their students (VCA/FFAM), where we exploited the collections of the museum to generate new creative content, that had a fabulous public outcome.

REFERENCES:

Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED326149

Haigh, Neil. (2010). The scholarship of teaching & learning: A practical introduction and critique. Ako Aotearoa, National Office, Wellington, New Zealand: Ako Aotearoa. https://ako.ac.nz/assets/Knowledge-centre/Scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning/SUMMARY-REPORT-The-Scholarship-of-Teaching-and-Learning-a-Practical-Introduction-and-Critique.pdf

on collaborative virtual learning in museum contexts

On the possibility of collaborative learning in virtual museum spaces

I am using this post to reflect on some of the ideas that emerged for me in the intersection of museum learning and digital learning in the group context. The idea of communities of practice, which I have also been reading more about, is fundamental to this: “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger 1998 and nice web summary here Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, 2015) . The community is formed around a ‘domain of interest’ and typically a ‘shared competence’in that domain; the ‘community of practice’ is joint activities/learning; and they have a shared practice, they “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems”. I’m fascinated to think about this shaped around a museum as a learning environment… (more to come on this in future blogs).

One angle on this is how digital media can interact with, and support with community of practice in a museum environment. Reading Scavarelli et al, ‘Virtual reality and augmented reality in social learning spaces: a literature review’, and jumping off into a number of the linked papers, I was particularly interested to learn more about the differences and affordances of VR and AR, and challenges around collaborative learning and haptic experiences.

The Awaken exhibition in the ground floor gallery of Arts West at the University of Melbourne used new technology to powerfully connect students with First People’s cultural objects.

Scavarelli et al talk specifically about museum learning, which is, of course, my chief context. They note “there is some promising work that explores how a virtual museum could emulate the social experience of visiting a physical museum by allowing learners to interact with virtual artefacts with VR or AR together” . Group learning activities are essential to utilising museum environments and collections (in object-based learning contexts) effectively, so clearly if we are going to get students into a virtual space, collaborative learning would also be ideal. One of the embedded articles in the Scavarelli lit review was by Li et al (2016), entitled Multiuser Interaction with Hybrid VR and AR for Cultural Heritage Objects. Li et al write: “Digital technology is at a stage where highly realistic objects and environments, real-time interactivity, and multiuser virtual experience have become possible“… And, later in the article, “Previous research has emphasised the importance of social interactions in museums as they tend to contribute to collaborative learning through discussions, debates which lead to deeper reflections on the subject [12]. These are important and should not be compromised when introducing emerging digital technologies.” [my emphasis]

I actually hadn’t thought about this at all in VR contexts, having imagined that a virtual VR experience was probably a solo one. AR seems a much easier way to have a social and collaborative learning experience in a museum, because it is both embodied and virtual, and can be experienced with devices (such as smartphone and tablets) that are more generally accessible .

[cultural] Object as [digital experience] interface

Li et al explore a cultural heritage digital experience of the Chinese Silk Road using photogrammetry models of artefacts from different collections around the world, with supportive text labels (in English and Chinese). Li et al simultaneously engaged participants who were using either VR (fully immersive) or AR (via smartphones) in a “multiuser, multidevice applicationLi et al (2016)) The AR users had ’embodied engagement’ through being able to manipulate a virtual cube, each side of which had an image of the object from that view, plus text information. In their study of user’s experience, Li et al found that the digital cube “gave users the impression that the cube embeds the artefacts and that the smartphone camera is the key to unlock them“. When a cube was ‘moved’ in the virtual world by an AR user, it’s movement was emulated in the VR world and a sound trigger alerted the VR participant to engage with the AR user’s perspective. And in a way that completely inverted my perspective on the world (ie, blew my mind), Li et al observe: “We consider VR and AR as being from different worlds, using different devices and therefore, the need for objects to be an interface connecting them.”

Cultural objects as portals to parallel virtual universes… Wow.

Social and haptic qualities of the virtual museum interactions…

Importantly, the study by Li et al found that users in these different but simultaneous virtual worlds of AR and VR started by sharing ideas about the appearance of the objects under observation, but moved on to sharing their interpretations and developing conversations that substantiated a social connection: “The awareness of another user through the object as an interface mitigated loneliness for them in a fully immersive environment“. I also found it fascinating that one of the main reasons the users in the study liked VR and AR technologies were that these technologies afforded “more dynamic interactions as compared to physical museum“. This is surely only the case in a physical museum, where objects are behind glass, and the only sense with which you can typically engage with them is sight. In University museums and galleries typically, an object-based learning (OBL) approach has been adopted in the past decade or so, that privileges multi-sensory engagement as a fundamental aspect of deep learning and enriched research opportunities. This shift, known as “the new sensory museology” has been a game changer. (see Chatterjee et al)

So we have a problem, with museums in tertiary environments trying to engage students in virtual ways as meaningfully as they would in physical ways. As recently as 2019,”WANG et al, in ‘Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges‘ wrote: “The haptic sensation obtained through virtual interaction is severely poor compared to the sensation obtained through physical interaction. In our physical life, the haptic channel is pervasively used, such as perception of stiffness, roughness and temperature of the objects in external world, or manipulation of these objects and motion or force control tasks such as grasping, touching or walking etc. In contrary, in virtual world, haptic experiences are fairly poor in both quantity and quality. Most commercial VR games and movies only provide visual and auditory feedbacks, and a few of them provide simple haptic feedback such as vibrations. With the booming of VR in many areas such as medical simulation and product design, there is an urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feedback for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sensation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.” [my emphasis]

So, two things jump to mind here: 1. the ongoing gap between a haptic physical experience in an OBL museum context, and the virtual learning experience with objects; and 2. the need to explore other ways that the virtual is BETTER than the physical, if the virtual is all you have (for example, international students engaged with the University’s museums and collections when studying from the other side of the globe). The possibility of VR in stimulating ‘transformative learning’ by increasing the user’s experience of another person’s perspective is something else to think about in the museum-learning context. Transformative learning by using the stimulation of highly affective artworks and objects underpins arts-based experiential learning to promote empathy, in the medical humanities field. What is the cross-over of these physical and virtual experiences of museum and art objects in the context of transformative learning? And how do we ensure accessibility across the physical and virtual museum environments?

And on a meta level, how does this all intesect with a community of practice around museum learning in digital spaces? All food for thought…

References:

Chatterjee, H., MacDonald, S., Prytherch, D., & Noble, G. (2008). Touch in museums : policy and practice in object handling (English ed.). Berg.

Y. Li, E. Ch’ng, S. Cai and S. See, “Multiuser Interaction with Hybrid VR and AR for Cultural Heritage Objects,” 2018 3rd Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHERITAGE) held jointly with 2018 24th International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia (VSMM 2018), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2018, pp. 1-8

Dangxiao WANG, Yuan GUO, Shiyi LIU, Yuru ZHANG, Weiliang XU, Jing XIAO,Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges, Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2019, Pages 136-162

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015). Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ Accessed 15.3.21

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, 2015

starting in the reading in ar/vr in museum learning… LEADING TO A BRAINWAVE ABOUT the grainger museum digital interface and a new rhizomatic approach

Some initial musings about the Grainger Museum context…

While reading through literature Thom suggested for the EDUC 90970 course, I had a thought about the definition of museums as ‘informal educational spaces’ (Scavarelli Robert et al), and wondered about what this perspective of informality (understood as ‘relaxed, friendly, unofficial’) tells us when it comes to context of tertiary learning in museums as part of university curricula: particularly in the context of the deliberately shaped physical and virtual environment we are working towards with the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, where we engage with 1000s of university students each year in curriculum and research contexts, across all levels of tertiary education. Relaxed (maybe?) and friendly (always!) sounds appropriate (in order to support student engagement where they are potentially worked in a cross-disciplinary way and out of their disciplinary comfort zone), but certainly not ‘unofficial’ when it comes to the core work I do in my job and the context of our University Museums and Collections. So I wonder if the qualification of museum spaces that are engaged in formal tertiary education changes the ideas around use of technology in these spaces … I expect it will support a powerfully engaged, directed use of technology in creative ways.

So, back to digital technologies and museum education. This topic is incredibly relevant to me in my current work. I’m leading the development of a new digital platform for the Grainger Museum, which is overtly exploratory, experimental, and supports the new Grainger strategy to bring a mutally-transformative research model to the heart of the work. We are considering a ‘brain’ like interpretation of the museum, it’s building, collections, themes, and ongoing research enrichment… Machine learning will be a major element that brings an experimentally creative output to the core data and research – like endless synaptic connections being made, expanding Percy Grainger’s original thoughts in infinitely varied ways. We are shaping the content to be in the Creative Commons space, promoting further creative digital engagement to ensure the Grainger story is endlessly evolving (rather than stuck in a historical moment/context). Another aspect is a virtual architectural version of the Grainger Museum, created by Point Cloud Scanning (working with RA’s and the scanning equipment based in Melbourne School of Design). This virtual environment will be a space to play, explore, curate, and present within for researchers and students, and accessible by the public. What that quite looks like yet is very open.

I’m also interested in the idea of rhizomatic learning, and how this might align (or not?) with the Grainger digital interface and student engagement. I am taken with the metaphor of the rhizome and Grainger’s ideas (anti-canonic) and the Museum’s purpose (radical). ‘In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents acritical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.” A fundamental principal is that students can “enter the community themselves and impact the shape of its curriculum as well as their own learning” (Cormier 2008)

I was led off on a musical rhizomatic tangent, to an article by Ronal Bogue about Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Piano Pieces for David
Tudor
, and in particular the musical score for Piece 4. It is in itself rhizomatic, superimposed on the domain of a music staff. (I can’t add an image as I’m confident it will still be in copyright… even though you can find images out there on the web, and you can see it in this interesting Blog). The score – really an artwork respresenting the aleatoric style of the music – was used by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari to illustrate the of philosophical concept of rhizome: interconnected living fibres with no definable central point or origin (different to the branching tree concept, where there is a clear central origin). This tangent just got me thinking (in a very rhizomatic way) about the beautiful way the philosophy of rhizomatic learning meshes over the concepts we are developing for the Grainger Museum digital interface (brain metaphors) and the heutological affordances of this environment for future teaching and learning experiences in the physical/digital space…

Electroencephalography by Natalie Doud from the Noun Project, Creative Commons

BRAINWAVE! (BTW brainwave picture sourced from Creative Commons, above, links nicely to the Grainger Museum digital project as being like an evolving brain).

So, the brainwave that has emerged from these reading explorations is that the module of a new subject that I’ll propose and start to develop, through the stimulation of EDUC90970, is for a fully online subject that is fully situated in the virtual Grainger Museum. This is a way of fully capitalising on the work we’re doing to create this publicly accessible virtual Grainger space, and deeply integrating it with the UoM Advancing Melbourne and the Cultural Commons’ goals relating to student engagement. Yay! Students will learn about virtual museum contexts (or bigger than that? – any cultural virtual context?), while undertaking real-life work on the Grainger collections, architecture, themes, etc and integrating this into the ever-growing, machine-learning enhanced, virtual Grainger Museum. Hmmm… Who are the academic collaborative partners? Is this a breadth subject, offered through multiple electives? Should be an elective for Arts & Cultural Management and Art Curatorship, but could also be an elective for Comp Sci Masters by Coursework, and others? B.Mus (Interactive Composition) elective, which explores sound, composition and virtual spaces? An elective in Science (eg Science Communication?) Could it link in virtual museum environments in Medical Humanities, and therefore be an elective in the new MD? Students have a extended research paper that they explore from their disciplinary perspective, which has an output a new node of the evolving Grainger digital brain….?? OK, Next blog is the start of a subject structure…

Biblio:

Ronald Bogue, Scoring the Rhizome: Bussotti’s Musical
Diagram, Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 470–490, DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.016
6

Sylvano Bussotti, Five piano pieces for David Tudor, London : Universal Edition, c 1959

Cormier, Dave (2008) “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum ,”Innovate: Journal of Online Education: Vol. 4: Iss. 5,Article 2.

Scavarelli, A., Arya, A. & Teather, R.J. Virtual reality and augmented reality in social learning spaces: a literature review. Virtual Reality 25, 257–277 (2021)

v&r mapping

Thom Cochrane shared in #EDUC90970 “In response to the critique of the Digital Native narrative popularised by Prensky, David White proposed the “Visitors and Residents” (VandR) framework of technology adoption. JISC subsequently utilised the VandR mapping exercise within their Digital Literacies framework and guides. The VandR mapping exercise provides a quick visual map of how students and academics interact with various technologies in the Institutional (or Professional) and Personal (or Social) domains. It also highlights the potential for rethinking how various tools can be used within a more professional domain rather than merely within a social or personal domain.”

I created a digital version in this mapping tool. A fascinating exercise, which had me thinking visually about my use of digital tools across my professional and personal life. I used different colours to group the way I used the various tools (storage for T&L, teaching/presenting, investigation (personal or professional, etc etc) and size to represent how much of my digital activity was conducted through each platform/tool. It was actually quite profound, not only the number of tools, but how they clustered so heavily in my professional life; how some overlapped suggesting I could simplify into a single platform for less ‘cognitive overload’; how sometimes the replications were a result of institutional mandates on what platforms to use, and sometimes were just ongoing redundancy of tools, with new platforms doing things better…but you still had hangovers from old tools ( for me Endnote to Mendeley over a more than a decade).

Infuriatingly, the platform timed out while I did other tasks (the email pile up etc) and I didn’t know and kept adding content, so when it came time to save and share… the whole thing disappeared into digital dust. Aaaarghhhhhhhhh. A lesson there…

So, I went to my old fallback, coloured markers on a large piece of paper, and whipped out a messy analogue version, which is what you see below.

Messy analogue version of a much more complex digital map, that disappeared in a poof of digital smoke when I tried to save it…

online exhibitions for VIRTUAL tertiary seminar in health

Through 2020 COVID challenges I added a number of new online exhibitions for the Grainger Museum, to support virtual delivery of object-based learning sessions. Originally set up to enhance public engagement with new exhibitions curated in the Grainger Museum, the virtual exhibitions in the Omeka platform hosted on the Grainger Museum website proved to be invaluable in the new virtual teaching space we were all forced to occupy last year. The new Making the Museum virtual exhibit allowed students to engage with the history and collections and themes of the museums in a very interactive way: I would send students off into breakout rooms in Zoom to virtually explore particular elements of the exhibit, and then they would share their observations and discussions back in the main group… just like in a physical interaction in the Museum. This worked beautifully for a variety of disciplinary areas, from architecture and design, to art curatorship, to musicology and education, and more.

For a postgraduate Clinical Education in Practice subject, the academic Jayne Lysk and I shaped up an even more hands on approach for the students. Using a Personal Responses Tour pedagogy we utilised a set of ‘questions’ the groups of students would address in each virtual breakout group. Student were then asked to post an individually selected image from one of the online exhibitions to a pre-prepared Padlet page (one for each group), write their personal response in the Padlet comments for their selected virtual ‘museum object’ and then discuss in their group. I then pulled each post across into a group Padlet which I screen-shared to the whole group for a summary discussion. This had the added value of concatenating everyone’s observations, allowing us to move into the transformation phase of the excercise, usually achieved in the museum as a final group discussion that related the content directly back to the core themes : observation, ethics, health contexts, diversity and empathy, etc.

Snapshot of Padlet page for gathered group posts

I have just updated the Padlets from 2020, for our 2021 Semester 1 iteration, removing all but one (anonymous) post from each group padlet but re-using the url to save prep time. The anonymous post from 2020 will kick start the activity even more effectively than last year. My final step is to check the ‘Padlet how to’ video I made and posted on the LMS last year, just to make sure it still did the job (and to see how much more grey my hair has got in the last 12 months 🙂 )

Clinical Teaching in Practice professionals in the Grainger Museum in an object based learning seminar