20
MARCH
THE DIGITAL MUSEUM
Reading No. 1
Community Websites: Linking the Personal to Urban History
Journal of Museum Education
Annemarie De Wildt
Reading No. 2
Giant Screen Film and Science Learning in Museums
Museum Management and Curatorship
John Fraser, Joe E. Heimlich, John Jacobson, Victor Yocco, Jessica Sickler, Jim Kisiel, Mary Nucci, Lance Ford Jones, Janie Stahl
Reading No. 3
Heritage Meets Social Media: Designing a Virtual Museum Space for Young People
Journal of Museum Education
Don Herbert Krug & Ashley Shaw
CLASS LECTURE NOTES:
Review notes from this week's class lecture
Reading No. 1
Community Websites: Linking the Personal to Urban History
Journal of Museum Education
Annemarie De Wildt
"Real knowing occurs through experience and much of what we learn through experience cannot be conveyed in words"
Research into people’s feelings towards history has shown that engaging with history on a personal and even emotional level is more appealing than grand narratives.
Technology can facilitate and encourage personal links with history.
Digitalization has enabled us to make more connections among objects, locations, and personal stories.
We try to avoid the good-and-bad scheme of WWII by showcasing 35 individual lives during the war and liberation presented in an imaginary street.
The website connects personal stories with ‘grand’ themes like migration, globalization of food production and the economy of the city. The website also functions as a means to find the stories behind some objects and to add new objects to the museum collection.
People share memories on the website, and old school friends have found each other, commented and have started to get together again.
Community websites are places where memory and history meet.
Sharing knowledge and authority is a difficult and complex process. “Safe stories” are more likely to appear on the web then “unsafe stories”…
Having a community website leads to questions like:
How do we deal with authenticity?
What to do with negative comments?
How to edit stories for more readable content?
Facts and feelings often get lost in translation, how do we overcome this?
Reading No. 2
Giant Screen Film and Science Learning in Museums
Museum Management and Curatorship
John Fraser, Joe E. Heimlich, John Jacobson, Victor Yocco, Jessica Sickler, Jim Kisiel, Mary Nucci, Lance Ford Jones, Janie Stahl
"Visual media dominates how people take in information; they have become the foundation on which individuals and society form fact and opinion."
It is important to first understand what science learning can be specifically attributed to this unique format.
Responds to the growing question of accountability in pursuing the development of new materials to support advancement in science learning.
Planetariums represented the first immersive experience for visitors.
Museums are faced with upgrading their theatres to smaller digital projection without the immersive quality or retaining existing formats with the recognition that GS film inventory may cease to grow.
Growing consensus that the GS experiences have unique attributes with direct impact on science learning. Emerging body of evidence suggesting that immersion, presence and narrative are the key components necessary for ensuring effective learning outcomes.
Immersion:
Those who defined immersive environments as learning places, characterize the experience as dominating the viewer’s senses, causing the viewer to become absorbed by the story and characters.
ELM (Experiential Learning Model):
Descriptive model of how people learn, posting that learning by individuals is contextual and constructed.
1. Experience
2. Exploration
3. Reflection
4. Forming abstract concepts
5. Testing
Presence:
Viewer being implicated in the narrative. Occurs when ‘a media consumer has the sensation of being with and connecting to people, objects and events’
Narrative:
Variation in story structure and sequence. Storytelling
Some findings related to narrative showed that realism in objects, events, dialog and acting contribute to the ability of audience to make a connection with the film.
Successful delivery of scientific content could be attributed to effective storytelling tactics
1. Storytelling matters
2. Reinforce audio and visual
3. Different film formats
4. Visualize what cannot ordinarily be seen
5. Expand the notion of landscape to include internal worlds and familiar things
6. Address content in terms of a larger takeaway message
Storytelling relates to the perceived quality of a science learning film
CLASS LECTURE NOTES
Museums and learning: The impact of mobile devices
use of ipads and digital devices in learning
Museum Week has a twitter event: every day they have a new hashtag—and each museum does stories related to that hashtag in their museum (#foodMW, #sportsMW, #musicMW, #heritageMW, #travelsMW, #storiesMW)
51% of the population own a smartphone (2012) and of that population what % that go to V&A and what % go online during their visit:
71% who go to the V&A own a smartphone
63% bring their phone
30% use their phone there during their visit
opportunities and barriers to using mobile devices for learning in museums
possibilities for mobile development in learning
Level 1: productivity—calendars, schedule, contact info, grading
Level 2: flexible physical access—local database, interactive prompting
Level 3: capturing and integrating data—network databases, data collection, mobile library
Level 4: Communication and Collaboration—real-time chat, annotations, SMS, wireless email
thinking about a gallery/museums there may be levels of barriers to reaching people on their mobile device
Everything should be mobile friendly
Show and Tell: using mobile devices for learning
1. Scotland’s secret bunker—handheld playback (in Fife)
2. Culloden—GPS enabled PDA guide
3. Stonehaven Heritage Trail—QR codes
4. London Museum—Augmented reality
5. Arbuthnott House—iBooks
Tripadvisor is a great resource for informal feedback from visitors to museums/heritage sites
Culloden—audio guide is nice because it is short enough and bc it’s GPS enabled it tracks your destination (but other times just keeps repeating the same information)
How space is organized (locating yourself is important in experiencing the museum—especially if it’s an outdoor museum in an open field! like at Culloden) It’s nice at Holyrood how they have numbered posters directing people to press the right number for the room in case you get lost or removed from the “regular path” of the audio tour.
How do museums know which technology to adopt and which to move forward without?
Museum of London is a national authority museum—run by the city of London
traces the history all the way back to the romans and through today
Augmented reality: using your phone, you are able to super-impose what that image would have looked like in the past.
Visitors to the museum tripled after using StreetMuseum app to help visitors visualize their physical space in the link between the museum and their archives and the past of the city of London.
Anne Frank House Amsterdam
Anne’s Amsterdam (similar to StreetMuseum app) allows you to explore the city today with overlays of the past city’s landscape with Anne Frank. People are able to walk around Amsterdam and be more aware of the history and the past of Amsterdam
Arbuthnott House—Launched digital guide
Make stronger links with Arbuthnott house people and the people of the community
Children workd with the family to create an online visitor e-book—children learning a lot about the history of the house and then learning about how to create digital book (editing, creating content, interpretation) valuable skills (also sharing generational perspectives)
Spectrum of fixed setting, curriculum led vs mobile, informal
(fixed) Handheld response systems
PDAs in classrooms
Mobile technology for field trips
Handheld tourist guides
Social networking and media creation on smartphones
(mobile) informal collaboration with mobile phones
Online exhibition (King’s museum)
working with the IT department at the university
Sunset song was a popular exhibition—so would be a good start
More interpretation than you could get from social media
Images of the galleries
Simple and easy to use
Each case (image of case, close up of case, object and caption, link to Aberdeen university catalogue)
Digital collections can provide access to groups of school children who couldn’t have come because of time/cost restraints and because it’s not possible to have 15-8 year olds in the museum stores. It’s not the same as seeing things in real life as seeing a picture, but this is a good medium as you can view it in a digital space and as if existing in a virtual reality.
Objects and touch vs digital things and thinking about that in relation to essay topic
Look at the audience of the museum---what does your visitor want? How can you provide it using technology? What is your budget?
What next?
something else is always coming, changing technologies
Google glass
iWatch
3D printing
What do mobile phone offer to learning in museums?
Access to resources
location aware/contextualize
Personalization
Augmentation
Capture and creation
Communication
Collaboration and networking
Your ideas
In pairs discuss possible application of mobile devices for learning in your own contexts
Select one idea on which to develop a short pitch
Present your pitch to the group for feedback/questions
Issues:
continual technological change
control, power, ownership (no photography in museums)
ethics
social attitudes
Reading No. 3
Heritage Meets Social Media: Designing a Virtual Museum Space for Young People
Journal of Museum Education
Don Herbert Krug & Ashley Shaw
"Social media sites 'mirror much of what we know to be good models of learning, in that they are collaborative and encourage an active participatory role'"
How young people actually use technology and the internet, how do they use it in pursuit of informal learning projects, and what role it plays in ideintity formation
Young people 15-25 yrs old
95% of Canadians under 55 have internet access
Young Canandians spend 3 hours per day online doing nearly as much school-work online as they do offline.
‘Academic moral panic’-expectation of connectedness, communication and information on demand mean traditional societal structures, starting with schooling, must be completely reworked to meet their needs.
Young people are skilled multitaskers
They believe that the information they find should be presented in ways that are ‘portable, personalized, and participatory’
1. Connecting with others
2. Generating the interacting with information
1. Engagement:
Extended emotional involvement or making a commitment to something
2. Game Play and Learning:
The overlap of play and cognition has fascinated researchers for the past 10 years
Harnessing the intrinsic characteristic of game play could be used to transform the current designs of curriculum organization.
3. Informal Learning and Participatory Culture:
Informal learning—motivated by personal interest, self-directed, and frequently reliant on the internet to assist in their projects.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)-‘set of contexts found in physical or virtual spaces that provide opportunities for learning’
4. Social Media Networking:
Staying in touch with friends and sharing media
The ability to create and maintain social networks is important in the pursuit of learning!
5. Identity Formation:
The internet creates a new social condition, offering young people spaces in which they can engage in such identity exploration and experimentation.
GOFFMAN-Dramatic performance, testing and trying out new identities in new scenarios depending on your audience.