 pedagogy is developing across universities. Digital elements have to come into it and this is something that we are kind of grappling with in all sorts of different ways and so I want to tell a story and I've written a pre-circulated paper which is available through Colleen's blog but I want to do this more as a kind of storytelling part of that kind of narrative way of getting. So like all good stories that should start with the question. How many of you are Australian? Any of you? Any of you spent any time at an Australian university? Yeah a little. Anyone done any fieldwork in Australia? Gone on a project? Gone for a? Yeah a little. Okay so this is the context Australian archaeology is the setting and Australian universities are the setting. I'm at the Australian National University which is the national university which is a very high profile research university but it's also a very small university and it's a state-funded small university which means that student fees pay our teaching and research budgets and since we have about a third the students of other top Australian universities like Melvin, Sydney, University of Queensland we are trying to do our kind of top research, engage teaching exciting stuff on a very very very attenuated budget and so we're trying to do all these exciting things as well but with a lot fewer resources than some of our kind of peer universities. Add to that that our student body this is a state-funded university and we're in a rural location we're in the capital but if any of you have ever been to Canberra, Canberra is a city of 380,000 people that once you hit the city limits it is three hours of kangaroos in all directions. That's pretty much it. You can see the Milky Way from the center of the city because there's no industry. Our student base is largely rural. Our student base is largely a mix of working class and kind of families of civil servants. We have a very high number of first generation university students. We have a lot of mature students. We have a lot of former military because a lot of the military is based in Canberra and all of that leads to the issue that we have a lot of students with lives outside the classroom as many people have these days and as teachers that causes us problems because we teach archaeology and archaeology is a materialistic discipline right? There are things you have to learn in archaeology that force you to engage with objects that force you to hold things in your hand and learn how they feel and learn how they look and learn in some cases what happens when you touch them to your tongue. I've done the stoneware thing I'm sure other people have to right? Licking the objects is something real but how we do that in a world where our students can't always come to class where we have no control over when our classes are scheduled and we can't repeat things without the university centrally getting involved. Where the university's idea of equity around attendance is to say that attendance isn't mandatory. So students are told from the outset that attendance at lectures and seminars is not mandatory that no one can force them to come which means that of course we have attendance issues and some of those are genuine and real and students have jobs and lives and children some of them are 19 year olds who haven't quite got their time management together and don't want to get out of bed for a 9 a.m. lab and that's the only lab we can run and we can't reschedule it. So my colleague Sophia Sumpercato and I started talking and I've brought props because the point of this is to talk about the materiality and the digital of things. I have props. These are 3D printed wombat skulls. They're in two different materials. Please look past, try and get your hands on both of them if you can. Feel the differences. Have a look at them. Sophia is an archeozoologist and she was trying to come up with ways to teach students bone identification when they couldn't always come to labs because our materials live in boxes in the basement and aren't accessible to students without a lecture present and we thought well maybe we can develop what we're calling a bone library. We can 3D print some animal bones particularly skulls and we can make those available. Students can sign them out from the office and borrow them and basically check them out for a few hours to practice and to play with them themselves in their own time when they're available and we said but how are we going to do this? We don't have the resources to do this. At which point we started saying well why don't we make this a bigger pedagogical project. We have friends in digital humanities. They have fancy digital 3D scanning equipment. Let's go talk to them and between the four of us Katrina Grant and Terri Nermico Fuller who are our friends in digital humanities and Sophia and I we put together a project we call the skull book project which is an entirely student led project designed to embed some of these ideas of grappling with materials and then building digital and also 3D printed new versions of those materials out of them. So what we did was to say right all the scanning is going to be done by digital humanities students. Sophia and I came into the classroom with a box of skulls and handed them out to a bunch of students who never studied archaeology never touched a bone in their life and were I'm not going to lie a little freaked out by the fact they were holding skulls in their hands. Explained what archaeologists like to look at really is the teeth and the sutures those are things that are important to us in order to identify them and said all right have act they were given kind of larger tools and techniques for scanning but Katrina and Terri who run that methods class decided instead of telling them how to do it they would just give them a variety of workflows and say okay your project is to invent your own workflow. While we were talking the students were handling the skulls just as you're handling skulls now getting familiar with the kind of heft and feel the bits and pieces of them and that's what they did over the course of the semester they played with them they got to know their skull really easily and they developed in groups three different versions of the scan some of them worked some of them didn't work so well some of them really really weren't usable in terms of archaeology this middle one for example very clean but of course there's sutures really poor teeth but that's the digital world right you experiment you explore you try something you create iterations you fail and you create another iteration from this we invited one of the most successful students and we had them write reflections on this process and one of the ones who was writing really good reflection we invited her to be an intern we should say a paid intern on the project and said why don't you kind of elaborate on your method she's the one who produced this scan the underside of the long bed skull why don't you elaborate on your method and 3d scan five skulls for us and we do have a sketchfab page and she did really really beautiful scans of these skulls as part of our project and we've printed the long bed skull the first of them out and that was also a process of experiment and revision and revising because you'll notice as you're passing there are two different materials in two very different qualities one is printed in plastic and it's not usable for archaeological identification purposes but it's very cool looking and one is printed in a much heavier and shinier resin and actually is very useful and that's what we're going to be printing these out in we're going to be making all of the scans as we develop them they're all available right now in sketchfab we're also going to put them up on the website all of the 3d models will also be up on the any website so if you ever want to print your own long bed skull you'll be able to very soon any color you want we spend some time thinking if the first version should be sparkly purple but our slightly gothy finish digital humanities collaborator insisted on shiny black was fine we let her but the point of all of this is that what we were trying to do was to a certain extent develop a teaching collection but also push back against these university structures that force us into certain sorts of teaching we're trying to put students at the center of our teaching as much as possible and these two very different conversations that I am many of my colleagues having first about pedagogy and student engagement disrupting the hierarchy of the classroom disrupting hierarchy of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination and then second resources available and opening the classroom to greater equity making the classroom friendly for students who have lives outside it we're able to come together in this space that both embraces the digital but also I think disrupts it as well because the whole point of it is not necessarily to create a digital world to disrupt our classroom but to create an alternate material world to kind of de-center the real objects to give more students that hands-on material link the artifact experience and that's where I'll stop