Byte at the Museum: Using digitised university assets in a student collaboration project

Abstract

In 2024 my new unit ‘HINQ303/503: Making Museums Digital’ ran for the first time in T3. In this unit, students explore the different ways that museums have interacted with the digital sphere. We look at broader themes such as the idea of digital space as public space, digitisation, and born digital materials, and their main assessment is to curate their own online exhibition. In addition to this, I also ran a two-day optional intensive school in Sydney where we visited some museums and met some of their staff, and, as a group, curated a small exhibition in a day at the UNE Sydney campus using 3D printed copies of ancient artefacts from the UNE Museum of Antiquities. Students collaboratively used the Pedestal3D platform to interact with digital models of the objects, experimented with the 3D prints, conducted research, came up with a theme and design, and curated the final display. In this presentation I detail this process and explore how this opportunity to use digitised UNE assets both in their digital and 3D-printed forms promoted peer-to-peer learning, interdisciplinary thinking, and digital literacy.