Using technology-enhanced boundary objects to develop techno-mathematical literacies in manufacturing industry

Due to the ubiquity of IT in workplaces and increasing customer demands, employees need skills that often remain unrecognised in companies. We draw attention to what we call Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL) - mathematical knowledge that is situated in the work context and mediated by the available technology. We describe a research project in which we identified through workplace ethnography the TmL required in several industrial sectors. Then we carried out design experiments in which we developed learning opportunities for particular samples of employees. These learning opportunities included technology-enhanced boundary objects (TEBOs) - computer tools that were reconfigurations of symbolic mathematical artefacts that employees use at work but where the underlying mathematical models are mostly unknown and generally poorly understood. In this paper we give examples from manufacturing industry.

[1]  Yrjö Engeström,et al.  Expansive Visibilization of Work: An Activity-Theoretical Perspective , 1999, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[2]  Mark A. Best,et al.  Statistical Process Control, 5th edn , 2005 .

[3]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences , 1999 .

[4]  J. I.  The Design of Experiments , 1936, Nature.

[5]  B. Schutt.  Sorting things out. , 1970, The American journal of nursing.

[6]  N. Davies.  Mathematical skills in the Workplace , 2003 .

[7]  Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi,et al.  P ERSPECTIVE M AKING AND P ERSPECTIVE T AKING IN C OMMUNITIES OF K NOWING , 2000 .

[8]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[9]  C. Hoyles,et al.  Mathematical skills in the workplace: final report to the Science Technology and Mathematics Council , 2002 .

[10]  L. Schauble,et al.  Design Experiments in Educational Research , 2003 .

[11]  C. Hoyles,et al.  Situating graphs as workplace knowledge , 2007 .

[12]  Paul R. Carlile,et al.  A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development , 2002, Organ. Sci..

[13]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 , 1989 .

[14]  Thomas Pyzdek,et al.  The Six Sigma Handbook , 2000 .

[15]  Celia Hoyles,et al.  Attributing Meanings to Representations of Data: The Case of Statistical Process Control , 2007 .

[16]  Celia Hoyles,et al.  Touching epistemologies: meanings of average and variation in nursing practice , 1999 .

[17]  John S. Oakland,et al.  Statistical Process Control , 2018 .

[18]  David Guile,et al.  Characterizing the Use of Mathematical Knowledge in Boundary-Crossing Situations at Work , 2007 .