Abstract:

Despite contemporary societies are working to develop global sustainability, complex issues of energy, environment, food, and health remain. Hence, a wide-ranging dialogue on global sustainability that goes beyond any given field is necessary, involving academic and cultural institutions and all the relevant stakeholders. Object-based learning is a method of active or experiential learning that incorporates objects into the learning environment (Chatterjee et al., 2015). It involves objects in a range of learning settings, including not only museums but also hospitals and the outdoors (Kador & Chatterjee, 2020). Most recently, the efficacy of object deciphering has been proposed as, which is an emerging approach derived from object-based learning for interdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary learning with objects related to own culture and tradition (Tanabashi, 2022). It should be practiced by combining digital technologies with objects related to own culture and tradition.

The use of object deciphering can be defined as interdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary learning with objects related to one’s own culture and tradition between personnel with different specialties to find, explore, and love one’s self by means of interaction beyond encounters and collisions with other learners (Tanabashi, 2022). However, insufficient discussion has examined ways to improve the learning design in virtual learning settings. Here, the author attempted to prepare the online learning material for object deciphering that surveyed the efficacious learning design of object deciphering to develop active dialogue across scientific fields for a sustainability education. To achieve this, an antiqued picture book of forest woods was used as the learning material, chosen because it relates to forest conservancy as a well-known content for global sustainability worldwide. This picture book of Japanese native forest woods (1900), is held as a rare book at the University Library for Agricultural and Life Sciences of the University of Tokyo (the faculty library of the graduate of agricultural and life science at the university), and it is available to the any learners through the library’s digital archiving system. Hence, this picture book can function as a learning material for students majoring not only in the agricultural and life sciences, including the life sciences and other diverse disciplinary fields.

The author has designed several case studies with intangible and tangible objects of forest plants, including the pine tree native to Japan for a case study for students. In particular, the intangible objects on a digital yard on digital archiving systems can be used as learning material for flipped learning. Students could identify the leaf and cone of Japanese native forest woods using online materials, prior to in-person learning. Then, students discussed the group members and plan their presentation content using several approaches, such as a poster tour with their posters/panels. These active learning approaches are more efficacious due to the use of digital archiving systems. The students were satisfied with the experiences that they had with numerous resources as learning materials. Sustainability issues should be resolved in ways that stretch beyond the wall of diverse disciplinary fields. The author will survey qualitative and quantitative efficacy to ameliorate learning design.

Keywords:

Object deciphering, object-based learning, digital archiving systems, university libraries.