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.