Use is a small word with big consequences for both the museums sector and universities where the user, be they general visitor, school group, student, or lecturer is meant to be the alpha and omega of programme development and impact assessment. In that context, ‘What’s the use?’ means both how do we use and why should we use museums or learning resources. But what does the word actually signify when we speak about using physical artefacts or digital material generated from them in teaching or research?
Most literature on the subject of object-centred learning is dominated by case studies and ideas for engaging HE users with real artefacts, without looking at underlying issues such as the connections between materiality and reception, interpretive frameworks in the real and digital encounter with the artefact, the stylistics of learning, pedagogical shifts in online learning, and the relationship between users and producers of content. Although some interesting work has been carried out in these areas by UCL and the University of Brighton, the V&A Museum et al (Cook, Reynolds, and Speight, 2010) there remains a gap in understanding the basics of the relationship between the artefact-user and the artefact used.
As a former curator-turned-academic working between a large independent heritage organisation and a postgraduate teaching and research institute, I find myself inhabiting that gap. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute both have significant museum, library, archive and built heritage collections at their disposal, and both use these to a limited extent in teaching and research. Both organisations have been magnets for visitors and scholars from across the world given their unique location in the town where William Shakespeare spent much of his life. But the opportunities of digitising those collections and engaging users across the globe on new platforms, have led both organisations to ask fundamental questions about who those users are, what they want and how this can be delivered sustainably. This has also raised questions about how the digital relates to the experience of actually being in Shakespeare’s birthplace, physically handling a First Folio of his work, or attending a lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon and asking questions face-to-face.
As gamekeeper-turned-poacher, my interest in all of this is how the various constituents involved in the preparation and use of collections interact with each other and with the artefact, at first hand and in virtual environments for learning.
In order to explore these connections, I designed and worked on a project called Digital CoPs and Robbers: Communities of Practice and the Use of Artefacts in Virtual Learning Environments, funded by the AHRC and run by the University of Birmingham from Feb – Aug 2012. During the project I tested Etienne Wenger’s concept of communities of practice in a real environment populated by users and producers of artefact-based content (curators, archivists, librarians, digital consultants of various shapes and sizes, actors, students, and lecturers), and the artefacts themselves in real and virtual environments.
Wenger’s model for how communities form around shared interests and common endeavour proved extremely useful in understanding how particular (practitioner) ways of seeing influence ways of using artefacts. Although spoken language as a tool is not a clear-cut way of divining intention Swales (2003, 207), using Grounded Theory to analyse transcripts from workshops and visits to the museum store allowed me to generate patterns of use from words and actions. Starting with the basic question, ‘how are participants in the trial using artefacts?’ I looked for descriptors which relate to cerebral and physical engagement with artefacts – the space around the object in terms of actual, physical engagement with the artefact or use implied by action or discussion. Loosening my idea of what use might be to include intellectual and emotional usage, as well as physical use, was an important part of the process to consider the widest range of responses and uses and to avoid confirmation bias. Employing this wider definition, I identified 112 examples of use which were then distilled into parent and child codes. This then developed into a taxonomic scheme of artefact usage which was intended to set-out how practitioners and students are actually engaging with physical artefacts or their digital representations.
Given this basis for data collection and analysis, what does the data tell us about how artefacts are used? The big picture is that communities of practice seem to be using artefacts in ways which suggest not only different ways of seeing but different ways of learning, and this seems to depend upon whether artefacts are used in physical or digital form. The implications of this are profound: if the learning styles of producers and users (or produsers, a hybrid of both (Bruns 2007, 3)) are better known then interdisciplinary projects (which most object-based and digital initiatives are) have a better chance of producing more effective artefact-based learning resources.
The taxonomy of use also revealed patterns concerning the main types of engagement with the artefact. These broadly were discovery, identification, contextualisation, and interpretation but how each community of practice carried out this varied widely, as again this depends on the physical or digital nature of the engagement. Students interacting with the real or the digital material tended to act in much the same way in identifying artefacts through looking more closely, describing physical features, and by reference to metadata. However, progressing to contextualisation and interpretation, there is more divergence between those students who make contact with real artefacts and those who just engage with digital images and metadata generated (by other communities of practice) from them. For students who first viewed the real, physical artefact, during the contextualisation and interpretation stages they show evidence of thinking about issues which arise from material features of the artefact suggesting that the early encounter with the real artefact has a formative influence on the course of their research. In other words, the physical encounter triggers certain way of seeing artefacts or thinking about them.
Therefore, knowing more about how artefacts are used by practitioners associated with transforming artefacts into learning resources and research students who generally use them moves us some way from the question ‘what’s the use?’towards ‘which use?’. Potentially, the taxonomic approach could result in improved heuristics for the digitisation of material, a model for studying the effect of environment (as suggested in Taylor's 2001 study of surrogation at the Toledo Museum of Art), or even metrics for measuring the impact of artefact-based learning.
References:-
Bruns, Axel. 2007. Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-led Age. Proceedings ICE 3: ideas, cyberspace, education, Loch Lomond, Scotland,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/6622/1/6622.pdf retrieved 21/09/2012
Cook, B., Reynolds, R. and Speight, C. Ed. 2010. Museums and Design Education: Looking to Learn, Learning to See. Ashgate, Farnham
Swales, John. 2003. ‘Is the university a community of practice?, British Studies in Applied Linguistics 18, 203-216
Taylor, Bradley L. 2001. The Effect of Surrogation on Viewer Response to Expressional Qualities in Works of Art: Preliminary Findings from the Toledo Picture Study,
http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2001/papers/taylor/taylor.html#ixzz2BkFcJfpGretrieved 09/11/2012
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