July 5. Universeum Conference /

During the slot that our project team had during the 2022 Universeum Conference, we introduced the project, presented a case of object-based teaching, and organized round tables in smaller groups:

At /Learning from success: Good Practice for teaching with objects/ the participants found their success in collaborative teaching, hands-on experiments, sharing practices and resources, teacher education, and student internships. One thing we also heard at the July 4 expert meeting was that this group experiences success in putting oneself as a teacher in the position of interlocutor and facilitator, rather than an instructor.

The second group, /Learning from failures: challenges, mistakes, problems/, while also mentioning pro's (one being the advice to use unfinished objects in the classroom),also opened up about the challenges the field is facing. For example, the lack of visibility of the collections; in many cases, staff and students cannot find their way to the collections. Another concern is the knowledge gap where students recognize historic objects more than recent artifacts.

In the group Teach me to teach: How to make a guide for teaching with objects many ideas were put forward. One was to explore the creation of video tutorials with highlights of do's and don'ts. It was also underpinned that enough attention should be given to digital strategies with a wide range of examples.

The topic of the last group was 'Designing hybrid and digital lessons: when you need to present an object online'. A large part of the discussion addressed 3D modeling; the costs and the dependency on service providers etc. The opportunity, however, is there: the group recognized 3D modeling as an alternative to face-to-face teaching, especially if face-to-face education is beyond our reach. The question of the sustainability of digital methods was also raised: the resolution of the images produced, the weight of these images, the notion of standard formats, hosting, sketchfab. And what about the future of all these generated images? They end up representing a digital collection, parallel to the material collection; these new collections, inevitably, have their own challenges as well.

All of the above roundtables generated lively and productive discussions, helping our project to move forward in a direction that reflects the wishes and aspirations of the object-based-teaching community.