I found the object-based learning lecture interesting for a few reasons. I’d slightly misunderstood what object-based learning was, and it was interesting to hear about different frameworks that got learners to do most of the talking in class. The one I was most drawn to Prown’s Forensic Analysis (Prown, 1980) — I enjoyed the materialist aspect of the analysis, and how rooted it is in the objects themselves, and I found it easier to relate to a technical context than the other examples.
One of the things I found surprising about it was the extent to which the frameworks and techniques didn’t immediately fit well with the teaching we do in the CCI, despite so much of our teaching having to do with objects. Prown specifically describes artistic objects as being distinct “from tools or mechanical devices” in being responsive to an analysis of form, and that “the configuration of a functional object… is almost completely determined by its purpose” (Prown, 1980).
Additionally, many technical objects operate at high levels of abstraction — packaged in standardised components that can make it very hard to discern functionality without higher level technical knowledge. Despite absolutely being cultural and social artefacts, analysing them in terms of outward appearance would miss a huge amount of potential information about what it actually is that they do in the world (that also forms a lot of their cultural/social function).
After thinking for a while, I could come up with a couple of examples from my own technical and teaching work that felt like they fit the broader technique (inquiry led mostly by questions/speculation from students rather than talking from staff). The first has a more material approach; the second takes a more science-and-technology studies focus, to understand a technical object in terms of its wider social implications.
E-waste workshop
The e-waste workshop is an annual workshop run by CCI technicians where we take apart electronic waste produced in the lab over the course of the year. This has included projectors, laptops, toasters, kettles, scanners and one huge iMac. The format of the workshop is that everyone — technicians, students — takes apart different items and asks each other questions about how they are made and how they work.
These questions bridge different technical areas — parts of physics, standards bureaucracy, manufacturing processes, supply chains, the politics of repair — that produce a way of looking at everyday technical objects. In some ways it’s almost an inverse of Prown’s approach — taking a contemporary object with which everyone is familiar, but finding questions that are less asked about it. Perhaps, reflecting on the original question, one of the ways to subject a technical object to this kind of learning technique is to take it apart.
Databases
For some teaching work I did at the CCI on open data, I came up with a list of questions to ask about databases, to help students think critically about them as social objects. These are partly inspired by Data Feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020), and partly from my own work on public access data provenance with the Knowledge Futures Group.
- Who made it?
- Who paid for it?
- What knowledge does it claim to represent? Is this accurate?
- Where does the information in it come from? Does the database tell you about this?
- How often is it updated? Who maintains it?
- Is there a record of the changes made? A version history?
- Am I able to challenge what’s in it? What’s the process for that?
- Is it accessible? Can I get a copy of it?
- Is the information in it legible? To whom?
These questions help to frame and situate the database as a social rather than a technical artefact — made by people, and subject to stylistic cultural and political decisions. It’s still not an exact match for something like Prown — by definition, most of these questions can’t be answered just by looking at databases themselves (and in fact many of these questions have non-answers, which are also indicative).
Reflections
I’d like to think more about how to combine these approaches, and explore them in the microteaching exercise. I’ve written elsewhere about my interest in the militarised aspects of technical development, though I think these histories can be hard to read from the objects themselves without some introduction — and I’m also really interested in teaching techniques which involve me talking less! I think combining some transfer of specialist knowledge with tools to scaffold students to do that is what I’m most interested in.
References
D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F. (2020) Data feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Prown, J.D. (1980) ‘Style as evidence’, Winterthur Portfolio, 15(3), pp. 208–215. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/495962.