Museums and e-learning – on the same time-line? - by Dr Naomi Norman
When I was a child, a visit to a museum largely meant ‘looking’ and ‘reading’. Rarely did it mean ‘listening’, ‘touching’ or truly ‘participating’ (except, to some extent, if I was lucky enough to go to the Science Museum). Nowadays, all that has changed, as museums endeavour not just to impart information, but to engage and involve visitors too.
The many imaginative tools employed by museums to keep our interest and enhance our experience (so that we may go away having learnt) never fails to surprise and delight me. For example, recently, when using my phone to check emails in the queue for entry to a museum, a member of staff approached and invited me to connect to their wireless so that I could ‘listen’ to audio files as I browsed exhibits.
Relaying this story to Andrew Lloyd, one of Epic’s instructional designers, he told me of the Brooklyn Museum in the US. There, they have exploited technology in many different ways to enhance learning. Apparently, in one gallery curators have placed an ipod touch next to each work of art, so that visitors could choose to touch to view (or not!) a video clip of an interview with the artist. In another gallery they got rid of the curators altogether! Drawing inspiration from James Surowiecki’s acclaimed book, The Wisdom of Crowds, (in which it's asserted that a diverse crowd often makes better decisions than expert individuals), they invited artists to submit photography, and then the general public (rather than a curator) to vote on those works to appear in the exhibition.
In many ways e-learning has followed a similar track to museums – originally dominated by ‘looking’ and ‘reading’, now it too involves ‘listening’ with audio and increasingly podcasts, ‘touching’ with the growing use of new kinds of touch screen technologies and more ‘participating’, as there is a move towards the integration of e-learning and web 2.0. (see our case study: http://www.epic.co.uk/assets/files/web20.pdf)
This begs the question of whether a look at what’s going on in the world of innovative museums could give us a hint for where e-learning is heading next? Well, only this week I read that coming soon to Chiba, Japan... you will be able to don a pair of virtual reality glasses and see near life-size and moving 3D images of dinosaurs right there in the City museum. Now that surely has some interesting potential for e-learning, but I guess that’s probably a whole new blog post!
In the meantime, why not comment below on what you think e-learning can learn from museums?
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Reply #3 on : Fri August 07, 2009, 13:50:59
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