Beyond the museums walls An examination of current trends in museum webbased education.

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• Beyond the museums walls - An examination of
  current trends in museum web-based education.
• Kevin Sumption Associate Director, Knowledge
  and Information Management, Powerhouse Museum.

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Museums and the Web

• Build new virtual and real audiences
• Critically ESD strategies should also explore how
  electronic marketing and promotion can encourage
  real use of museum programs and services.
• Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) via the WWW
  offers opportunities to expand the Museums
  scholarly reach beyond its walls to new regional,
  national and international audiences.

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Museum Web Services

• In very general terms there are 6 basic products
  Museums are currently delivering via the web
• 1. Electronic publications
• 2. Remote access to collections
• 3. Research gateways
• 4. Virtual exhibitions
• 5. Shop merchandise
• 6. Curriculum specific education content

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Five active learning typologies

• Shift from seeing the web as an information
  medium, to that of an active learning
  environment.
• Many museums are creating web-based learning
  environments within which users, not educators,
  are empowered to make decisions about the tasks,
  content, navigation, presentation and assessment
  activities they undertake.

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1. Education Meta-centers

• Education meta-centres are web-based resources
  that allow students to explore, investigate,
  compare and evaluate textual and pictorial
  information from museum collections and archives.
• Generative learning - comparative activities that
  allow students to mentally experiment
  (generative) with various data sets

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2. Creative play resources

• Creative play is an important part of young
  childrens learning and describes those
  experiences that encourage them to explore and
  test ideas through the process of making.
• Too few museums are developing active learning
  resources for under eights!

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3. Electronic field trips

• Electronic field trips employ credible
  microworlds convincingly transport students
  through time to historical sites through space
  to the museum or through their imagination, to
  fictitious and fantastic worlds
• Anchored instruction activities utilise sets of
  interconnected problems to encourage users to
  activate their reasoning, deduction and
  investigative faculties

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4. Video conferencing

• Unlike current electronic field trips, video
  conferencing utilises synchronous technologies to
  connect students and teachers to the real
  museums staff and exhibits, in real time
• Human facilitation of genuinely open-ended
  learning experiences is still so necessary, and
  in turn a learning attribute of video
  conferencing unmatched by any other active
  learning typology.
• .

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5. Museum learning networks

• Learning networks characteristically provide
  aggregated access to an array of field trip and
  expository resources, themed around a single
  discipline like science, contemporary art or the
  environment.

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5. Museum learning networks continued

• Collaborative learning - activities that foster
  cooperative solution finding, through continuous
  communication. Best facilitated via real
  meetings, or chat rooms within which the process
  of creating a joint product is negotiated.
• Given the opportunity to directly control
  content, students are much more likely to be
  internally motivated to explore issues and ideas
  close to their heart.