4 ONLINE LEARNING
“Want to find out what the world was
like a century ago? Visit a museum.
Want to find out what computer-based
learning was like a decade ago? Visit
a museum website!”
Was this speaker at a recent Museums and
the Web conference being cruelly satirical
or provocatively inaccurate? Possibly both,
for a look at museum websites reveals
almost every possibility from the tediously
dull and trivial to the imaginative and
innovative. This section of the review will
describe some of the major web resources
currently available, and begin to explore
how web resources can reflect underlying
theories of learning.
4.1 EVALUATING ONLINE LEARNING
There is little understanding of what
makes a successful museum website in
terms of learning potential (MDA 2001).
There are few formally developed
measures for evaluating educational
websites in general, let alone museum
sites:
“While it is clear that museum resources
can have a distinctive contribution to make
in terms of the learning that they can
generate, it is not clear whether this
distinctiveness is appreciable in classroom
use of websites or whether there are
different expectations and different criteria
involved in judging educational web
resources generated by museums.”
(MDA 2001)
In an attempt to provide evaluation criteria,
Schaller et al (2002) conducted a study of
learners’ preferences for different types of
web-based educational activities. From a
variety of museums’ websites they
identified six distinct types of activity:
• creative play
• guided tour
• interactive reference
• puzzle/mystery
• role-play/stories
• simulation.
They found significant differences in the
preferences of adults and children, which
they attribute to differences in motivation.
Adults, they contend, “know what they
want to learn and they want to learn it in
the most direct way”. Children, by contrast,
“respond positively to the opportunity for
interaction and choice within a goal-based
environment”. The authors assume
these differences to be axiomatic and
hardly surprising.
Potentially more useful is their analysis of
the correspondence of different types of
web learning activity with pedagogical
approaches: “discovery learning lends
itself to puzzles and mysteries, with their
single correct solution, while constructivism
supports user-created outcomes that allow
more personal choice and involvement”.
Most valuable is their general conclusion
that some combination of reference and
play is likely to provide maximum appeal
and, therefore, most learning potential.
4.2 MUSEUM WEBSITES
Many major museums and galleries carry
web-based products that tend towards one
or other of these extremes, often reflecting
the pedagogical perspectives of their
originators – curators, educators or web
designers. |
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The British Library began the Electronic
Beowulf project in 1993, as one of a number of initiatives to increase access to
its collections by the use of imaging and
network technology (www.bl.uk/collections/
treasures/beowulf.html). This electronic
version of Beowulf provides new, easy-touse
search facilities to help readers
explore the texts, opening up the
possibilities for sophisticated interpretation
and “close to challenging the object in
terms of being the ultimate repository of
knowledge” (Knell 2003)
The British Museum’s major online
learning resource is Compass
(www.thebritishmuseum.org.uk
/compass).
This is essentially an annotated online
database featuring around 5,000 objects
chosen by the curators “to reflect the
extraordinary range of the British
Museum’s collections”.
“The system features a wealth of links,
background information and maps. There
are online tours on a variety of subjects,
including introductions to the current
exhibitions. Each object featured is
illustrated with high quality images that
you can enlarge and study in detail. The
information has been written with the
general visitor in mind, and technical
terms are explained in glossary links.
If you want to find out more, many of
the articles give references to books
recommended by the curators.”
In contrast, Loverance (2001) summarises
the British Museum’s development of
educational websites on Ancient
Civilizations (www.ancientegypt.co.uk and
www.mesopotamia.co.uk). She suggests
three alternative strategies to draw
learners from better known to less wellknown
areas of content:
• familiarity or skills transfer
• discovery or experimentation
• confounding expectations.
The National Maritime Museum
(www.nmm.ac.uk) “seeks to promote
online learning as an extension of the
Museum’s collections” - through activities,
resources and information. The material
appears fairly typical of museums’ online
learning offers: a mixture of downloadable
resources, fun activities and textbook-type
pages. All carefully constructed and well
presented, but using digital technologies
essentially as a delivery mechanism.
The museum’s Search Station
(www.nmm.ac.uk/searchstation) is a
more sophisticated product, the reception
of which has been universally positive
(Smith 2000). It offers interactive,
computerised access to nearly 2,000 items
from the Museum’s collections that may
not be on display. In the Museum, visitors
can access the Search Station using ten
linked workstations, always available to
adult learners and researchers and
bookable by school groups. The materials
are also available online on the Museum’s
website, and as a hybrid CD-Rom for
primary schools.
Online exhibitions can offer multiple
learning paths through material in
ways that real exhibitions cannot.
The Smithsonian’s Revealing Things
(www.si.edu/revealingthings), for example,
uses Thinkmap® for the provision of a
dynamic interface in which the learner has
control over content and narrative. Such
features permit a large degree of
experimentation, by both learner and
expert provider (Freedman 2003).
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online
exhibitions can
offer multiple
learning paths
through material |
