2024.Mar.12

REPORTS

Report on the 4th BAIRAL Research Meeting for 2022
“Stock and Flow of Cultural Resources to the Educational Field from the Perspective of ‘Relationship between Technology and Society’”

The 4th BAIRAL research meeting for 2022 was held online on July 19, 2022. At this session, Masao Oi, a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo and a project researcher at TRC-ADEAC Inc., was invited to speak on the theme of “Stock and Flow of Cultural Resources to the Educational Field from the Perspective of ‘Relationship between Technology and Society.’”

As digital transformation progresses, various materials are becoming accessible to people. It has been pointed out that connecting museums, libraries, archives, and educational institutions to utilise materials is essential. However, more is needed to store materials simply; it is also necessary to transform the stored materials into flows and foster communication. The realisation of a digital archive society is a national policy goal, and Oi focuses mainly on the educational use of digital archives, conducting practical research in collaboration with schools.

In the presentation, Oi introduced the concept of “Curation Learning.” Curation learning involves students posing questions, collecting materials related to those questions, and engaging in discussions with classmates and others to generate new knowledge and inquiries. To realise this method, comprehensive, searchable digital archives and functions that facilitate collaborative discussion and structuring of questions have been designed and implemented in school education. Utilising Japan Search, a workspace function for collecting and editing materials collaboratively, was developed in collaboration with Japan Search developers. Furthermore, learning content and materials are accumulated and linked through repeated curation learning, forming a separate archive.

Additionally, to promote the emergence of students’ inquiries in individual curation learning sessions and broader units and to create a mechanism that connects materials with learning curricula, a practice called “S×UKILAM (Skilam) collaboration” is being implemented. In the S×UKILAM collaboration, educators and content holders such as museums, libraries, and archives cooperate to create teaching materials collaboratively. Workshops are held to develop teaching materials, involving educators and other stakeholders in utilising a variety of materials in education, akin to educational development competitions held overseas. He also introduced examples of practices in multiple municipalities.

Finally, he showed that connecting the curriculum guidelines by RDF and LOD with different knowledge systems through machine-readable methods is possible. NHK for School videos under development and Japan Search data can be connected with the curriculum guidelines, demonstrating the potential to utilise them in connection with other digital archive materials and examples of students’ curation.

After his presentation, participants actively discussed the necessity of oscillating between learning in the digital space and learning face-to-face with teachers and experts in physical space, the importance of communicating the context and materiality of materials, and evaluation methods in curation learning. Concerns about the digital divide were also raised; he noted the necessity of addressing individual differences and highlighted complementary learning through group work in practice, stating that there were effects beyond just using materials.

Oi’s practice of promoting inquiries from various perspectives of students using diverse materials on digital archives is expected to further develop with the involvement of stakeholders, content holders, and technology. By involving a wide range of content holders, including professional experts such as curators, librarians, archivists and citizens involved in preserving local materials and stakeholders in community archives, the potential for diverse learning for students will expand further.