Object-based Learning Research Articles

Understanding Dworkin through art: object-based learning and law

ABSTRACTThis article explores object-based learning (OBL), a burgeoning pedagogical approach in higher education. Object-based learning engages students’ pre-existing visual and conceptual literacy as a gateway to work through difficult threshold concepts. The article advocates this exciting learning model in law by articulating what it is, explaining how it can be applied through the example of teaching Dworkin in a jurisprudence module. The article introduces OBL approaches, details how it is relevant to jurisprudential teaching as well as its scope for application across legal teaching. It explains how such an approach moves away from transmission modes of teaching into transformational ones, accessing students’ abstract web of comprehension in conjunction with text-based learning to produce more imaginative and creative critical thinking skills.

Creative Approaches to Information Literacy for Creative Arts Students

This paper discusses the information literacy requirements of art and design students, and how traditional approaches to information literacy education are not always appropriate for these particular students. The paper argues that different, creative, and innovative approaches to information literacy training need to be developed with the specific learning styles of this group of students in mind and that using a radical information literacy approach, incorporating the specific nature of the art and design information landscape, enables this. Using the University of the Arts London (UAL) as a specific art and design higher education institution, the paper shares three separate case studies which demonstrate such approaches including the incorporation of drawing, object-based learning, and enquiry-based learning into information literacy.

Engaging the Senses: Object-based Learning in Higher Education (Chatterjee and Hannan, eds.)

This work is a book review considering the title Engaging the Senses: Object-based Learning in Higher Education edited by Helen Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan.

Creating the Museum Experience

This article explores the benefits of bringing museum education into the composition classroom to help students develop confidence and skill in oral presentation. Drawing on current scholarship in object-based learning and engaging museum audiences, it outlines a project in which students closely observed objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and critiqued a museum tour before presenting on their objects on-site at the museum. As well as teaching students new skills, the project also encouraged them to use their own experiences as audience members in the classroom and the museum to create more engaging and coherent presentations for their peers. The article explains the logistics of the project and students' reactions, concluding with students' own reflections on the benefits of presenting in a museum setting.

Interdisciplinary Character Education Through Object-Based Learning: An Elementary School Case

Interdisciplinary Character Education Through Object-Based Learning: An Elementary School Case

‘For the bibliographers at UCL’: A humument and the lessons it teaches 21st century librarians

Object-based learning lies at the heart of teaching in both historical bibliography and cataloguing classes on the MA Library and Information Studies at UCL. Tom Phillips's work A humument and the novel he chose to use as his canvas, W.H. Mallock's A human document provide memorable ‘object lessons’ with scope for students to synthesize and evaluate their pre-existing learning from inside and outside the modules. It is important that the examples used in class are simple enough to illustrate the strengths of any conceptual model yet complex enough to highlight its limits. It is also ideal if examples can be beautiful as well as useful. A humument fulfills all these criteria and, for students with no background in art or art librarianship, also introduces the artists' book as a genre and artists themselves as an important and interesting user group within information services.

Appreciation of Authenticity Promotes Curiosity: Implications for Object-based Learning in Museums

ABSTRACTMuseum professionals suppose that interacting with authentic objects promotes curiosity and engagement, but this has not been tested. In this research, children and adults visiting the Oxford University Museum of Natural History were shown a taxidermied rabbit or rabbit skeleton. They were asked “Is it real?”, “Why?” and were given the opportunity to ask a question about it to measure their curiosity and engagement. As predicted, visitors who perceived the rabbits as authentic were more likely to ask a question than those who judged them as inauthentic. Perceived authenticity also promoted more why questions. In general, these findings became more robust with increasing age. However, approximately 25% of visitors did not perceive the rabbits as authentic. This study thus supports the assumption that authentic objects are associated with increased curiosity and engagement but museum professionals need to ensure that visitors know when they are interacting with the real thing.

Multi-scale object-based measurement of arid plant community structure

ABSTRACTThe measurement of plant community structure provides an extensive understanding of its function, succession and ecological process. The detection of plant community boundary is rather a challenge despite in situ work. Recent advances in object-based image analysis (OBIA) and machine learning algorithms offer new opportunities to address this challenge. This study presents a multi-scale segmentation approach to accurately identify the boundaries of each vegetation and plant community for mapping plant community structure. Initially, a very high resolution (VHR) Worldview-2 image of a desert area is hierarchically segmented from scale parameter 2 to 500. Afterward, the peak values of the standard deviation of brightness and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) across the segmentation scales are detected to determine the optimal segmentation scales of homogeneous single plant and plant community boundaries. A multi-scale classification of vegetation characterization with features of multiple bands, NDVI, grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) entropy and shape index is performed to identify dryland vegetation types. Finally, the four vegetation structural features on the type, diversity, object size and shape are calculated within the plant community boundaries and composed to plant community structure categories. Comparing the results with the object fitting index (FI) of the reference data, the validation indicates that the optimal segmentations of tree, shrub and plant communities are consistent with the identified peak values.

Teaching with Artifacts and Special Collections.

Teaching with Artifacts and Special Collections Lois Hendrickson Artifacts, material culture objects from the past, fascinate students. They are intrigued with the unknown, consumed with curiosity, and delighted to discover the true identity of these items. At the same time, engaging students with artifacts and special collections enriches student learning, stimulates critical thinking, and increases historical literacy. Students gain skills in solving problems, analyzing and synthesizing evidence, and communicating the results. By being able to touch artifacts and think about who used them and how, and by contemplating the technologies, ideas, and assumptions of a given time, history is humanized for students. The utilization of primary sources in teaching has been discussed in the literature since the mid-1980s. As Ken Osborne noted, the rise of “New History” in the 1960s and 1970s led to an increase in student-centered, activity-based use of historical documents and the need for archivists to act as educators.1 In the late 1990s, my archivist colleagues and I saw an upsurge in requests to lead sessions introducing University of Minnesota students to primary sources. Despite the decades of interest in teaching with primary sources, however, pedagogical engagements with material culture are focused primarily on curriculum units for K–12. The Library of Congress, for example, “offers materials and lesson plans to help teachers effectively use primary sources that meet Common Core standards, state content standards, and the standards of national organizations.”2 The plethora of scholarship on object-based learning for K–12 schools is matched by work being done with a museum focus.3 This work typically measures a visitor’s interaction with objects in an exhibit-centered, interpretative and place-based context. More recently, and again within a museum context, inquiries into the value of learning with objects in higher education has been undertaken at the University College of London by Helen Chatterjee and her colleagues. The rationale for the UCL project was that little had been written on the particular benefits of this method of learning for university programmes—despite universities holding large and unique collections of art works, manuscripts, specimens, rare books and artefacts. This research is strongly linked to pedagogies of active and experiential learning, which sees hands-on engagement with the object of study as key to personal meaning-making and the long-term retention of ideas.4 [End Page 136] Objects inspire critical thinking skills, and written and oral communication skills, and as Chatterjee points out, “Objects can be employed in a variety of ways to enhance and disseminate subject specific knowledge, to facilitate the acquisition of communication, team working, practical, observational and drawing skills, and for inspiration.”5 Dominique Tobbell and I are integrating learning with objects into the undergraduate classroom using the artifacts and special collections of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Medicine and Biology. In Technology and Medicine in Modern America, artifacts are both a constant thread throughout the course, as well as the focus of the final research paper (the course syllabus is online at https://www.hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/content/syllabus-archive). Our initial step in this collaboration involved a conversation to gauge my interest and to understand the policies and parameters of artifact use. Following this, we met to look at her draft syllabus. For each of the potential themes; for example, technology and medical professionalization, technology and gender, and technology and the patient, I identified related primary printed texts, manuscripts, and artifacts. As the syllabus was finalized, some themes assumed more prominence, some were not well represented by artifacts in the collections, and some were outside of the timeframe of artifact’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century focus.6 We decided to focus on six sessions, and to have me bring artifacts related to the reading and/or lecture into the classroom for the final twenty minutes of a session. In the first session students examined four or five technologically interesting objects not related to the syllabus. This served to introduce me, the Wangensteen Library materials, as well as serving as an introduction to material culture and the correct way to handle artifacts. The inaugural class was a seminar size of [End Page 137] about twenty, so students worked as...

Teaching Don Quixote in the Digital Age: Page and Screen, Visual and Tactile

This current study describes an object-based learning approach to teaching Don Quixote as part of the curriculum for Spanish majors at a small liberal arts college. In order to maximize students’ engagement with the narrative and the material culture of the novel, students worked with rare books, collaborative translation using Google Docs, digital and computational reading of the novel with Voyant Tools, iPad apps, and objects at the campus museum. The juxtaposition of the narrative, the material book, and the digital surrogates and supplements created a student-directed environment that produced an invigorated approach to textual analysis and a refinement of close reading skills.

Family Learning in Object-Based Museums: The Role of Joint Attention

ABSTRACTFrom an early age, joint attention serves as a basis for parent–child communication. This study explored how increased joint attention (2 people knowingly focused on the same object) might lead to increased learning as 54 families explored dioramas in a natural history museum. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, the authors tested 2 interventions intended to increase parent–child (5–8 years of age) joint attention to objects in the dioramas. In one intervention, families used flashlights to explore darkened dioramas, thereby restricting the visual field, and in the other intervention, families were provided with signage prompts intended to focus attention on particular diorama features. Results showed that families who explored dioramas with flashlights were significantly more likely to establish joint attention compared to controls. Furthermore, once families established joint attention around an object, they were more likely to engage in learning talk about that object, suggesting that relatively simple manipulations of joint attention might be an effective means of supporting family learning in object-based learning environments such as natural history museums.

A critical review of object-based learning and generic learning outcomes in museum education in Korea

A critical review of object-based learning and generic learning outcomes in museum education in Korea

Fast and Accurate Home Photo Categorization for Handheld Devices using MPEG-7 Descriptors

Home photo categorization has become an issue for practical use of photos taken with various devices. But it is a difficult task because of the semantic gap between physical images and human perception. Moreover, the object-based learning for overcoming this gap is hard to apply to handheld devices due to its computational overhead. We present an efficient image feature extraction method based on MPEG-7 descriptors and a learning structure constructed with multiple layers of Support Vector Machines for fast and accurate categorization of home photos. Experiments on diverse home photos demonstrate outstanding performance of our approach in terms of the categorization accuracy and the computational overhead.

Object-based Implicit Learning in Visual Search: Perceptual Segmentation constrains Contextual Cueing

Object-based Implicit Learning in Visual Search: Perceptual Segmentation constrains Contextual Cueing

The Development and Implementation of An Object-Based Learning Education Program: The Case Study of The Museum of Photography, Seoul

The Development and Implementation of An Object-Based Learning Education Program: The Case Study of The Museum of Photography, Seoul

Trials and trails: Do HE design students need museum learning resources?

There is a lack of collaboration between universities and museums in supporting design students' learning and a corresponding lack of targeted learning resources. This paper focuses on the iGuides from StreetAccess project, which has involved the creation of twenty web-based trails for design students to access on personalized digital assistants (PDAs) at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It reports initial findings from the evaluation of two trails, detailing aspects of trail design and their possible usefulness to students. It suggests that such materials can encourage students to develop object-based learning skills skills which design tutors may perceive as innate or best left to develop with the minimum of direction. It concludes that museums can usefully supply HE design students with guidance and suggest ways of engaging with their collections.

Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century (review)

Reviewed by: Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century Mirah Ingram Dow Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. 188p. $40 (ISBN 13: 978-1-59158-435-3) Today, many raise serious questions about educating the next generation for living and working in a democratic, information-rich, global society in America and around the world, and Guided Inquiry offers some solutions. It recasts inquiry learning by proposing an alternative to rote, mechanical repetitions and boring training for standardized tests and goes beyond ideology to describe steps to achieve the goal of successful, authentic learning situations. Inquiry learning reshapes schooling from that of the solo classroom teacher working in isolation to professional librarian and teacher teams involved in integrated instruction. Guided Inquiry presents a convincing plan for the instruction of pre-K–16 students so that they gain new confidence, competence, and expertise while acquiring information literacy skills. The authors are three educators, a mother and her two daughters, with inquiry at the center of each of their specializations. Their shared authorship is evidence of the value of collaboration and models a community-of-learners environment. Kuhlthau, professor emerita at the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University, is active today in The Rutgers Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries. She has conducted more than 20 years of research on the information search process (ISP). This process, which can be applied to both children and adults, provides the theoretical underpinnings to support this new practice of guided inquiry as outlined in her books on the topic (Kuhlthau, Teaching the Library Research Process, 2nd ed., Scarecrow Press, 1994 and Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services, 2nd ed.,Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004). Maniotes, a national board certified teacher and Reading Recovery certified literacy specialist, studies the concept of third space as it relates to engaging students in guided inquiry. Caspari, a specialist in museum education, studies the use of community resources and object-based learning. Many relevant examples of the authors’ research studies are found throughout the text. These authors assert that inquiry learning depends on guided inquiry, which is presented as a planned, supervised, and targeted method by instructional teams. It employs intervention strategies for enabling students to construct their own understandings by moving beyond factual knowledge to higher order thinking skills, including analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. [End Page 339] Guided inquiry is different from traditional research skills instruction, which is based on behavioral learning theories that focus on transmitting knowledge and skills to students in a structured manner with the teacher as the authority. Using the authors’ innovative approach to guided inquiry, a dynamic, interactive, conversational learning environment emerges. It predicts that students will gain a greater understanding of subject area content; develop competencies in reading, writing, and speaking; and increase social skills through interaction, cooperation, and collaboration. The book describes the benefits that students, teachers, librarians, administrators, and parents realize when they invest time, attention, and commitment to collaborative, learning-centered environments and when they value information literacy for all. These benefits should be considered thoroughly when weighing options for school reform in the 21st century. There are several fundamental principles in Guided Inquiry that are compatible with the new American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st Century Learner (Chicago: American Library Association, 2007). The first is that learning is an active, on-going process of construction that continues throughout life. Theories by John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and others are used to support the idea that significant learning takes place when students engage in stimulating, reflective encounters with information and ideas. Guided inquiry, like the new AASL standards, rests on these constructivist theories of learning and takes into account social and cultural aspects of acquiring knowledge. The second principle is that the expectations and instructions of teachers and librarians are critical aspects of inquiry learning. This principle is based in Kuhlthau’s ISP model. The ISP outlines seven process stages that students experience when expected to construct their own understandings. It explains students’ feelings of confusion and uncertainty that increase through the exploration...

Rapid, object-based learning in the deployment of transient attention.

We show that transient attention summoned by an exogenous cue shows rapid learning of the relationship between the cue and a subsequent target in a discrimination task. In experiment 1, performance was unaffected when a target always appeared in the same position on a large cue, but was degraded when the target could appear anywhere within the extent of the larger cue. Experiment 2 shows that it was not the predictability of where the target appeared within the cue that aided performance, but rather a consistent location mapping of cue and target, since predictably alternating the target location relative to the cue led to worse performance than when the target was presented in the same location relative to the cue from trial to trial. Further analysis of the results of experiment 2 shows that the learning is rapid, evident after one trial, and has a cumulative influence over four consecutive trials. Possible neural correlates of this form of learning are discussed, with a focus on the supplementary eye fields in the prefrontal cortex. The reported experiments show that transient attention is not a simple reflexive mechanism but can show rapid visuospatial learning, in object-based coordinates.

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method

Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method

Artifact Study: A Proposed Model

symbols of meaning. If a basic wonder about man is his capacity for building culture, certainly the next wonder is his astounding capacity for making things as part of his culture. In this he surpasses the animal a thousand times in cunning, power, imaginativeness, beauty, destructiveness, and grandeur. To know man we must study the things he has made-the Parthenon, the Panama Canal, Stonehenge, the computer, the Taj Mahal, the space capsule, Michelangelo's Pietti, the highway cloverleaf, the Great Pyramid, Rembrandt's self-portraits. The artifacts made and used by a people are not only a basic expression of that people; they are, like culture itself, a necessary means of man's self-fulfillment.