Facilitating Learning in Digital Museum Environments

January 1st, 2009 - January 1st, 2009 | PROJECT

Museums continue to invest in and experiment with internet technologies and increasingly with social software environments (i.e., social networking). These technologies have the potential to lead to a number of important intellectual and social outcomes such as learning, community building, and greater public understanding of, in our case, science. It is the possibility of supporting learning in digital environments that is the focus of this research project. In our previous work, online facilitation has emerged as a big deal and perhaps determines successful online museum environments from unsuccessful environments. To study facilitation, we seek to understand facilitation styles and their outcomes in two distinct but representative museum environments. The first, Science Buzz at Science Museum of Minnesota, is a popular website identified by the field to be exemplary because of its educational value and its use of Web 2.0 functionality. The second case is the more distributed use of social software at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science (MLS). Instead of creating learning platforms that are hosted internally, MLS is experimenting with building learning communities where people are already gathering on the web like Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. We anticipate being able to identify clear, replicable facilitation styles and to identify outcomes associated with those styles.

Project Website(s)

(no project website provided)

Project Products

Slides from 2012 Visitor Studies Association Conference

Team Members

Jeff Grabill, Principal Investigator, Michigan State University
Bill Hart-Davidson, Co-Principal Investigator, Michigan State University
Kirsten Ellenbogen, Co-Principal Investigator, Science Museum of Minnesota
Troy Livingston, Co-Principal Investigator, Museum of Life + Science
Beck Tench, Co-Principal Investigator, Museum of Life + Science

Funders

Funding Source: IMLS

Tags

Audience: Evaluators | General Public | Museum | ISE Professionals
Discipline: Computing and information science | Education and learning science | General STEM | Technology
Resource Type: Project Descriptions
Environment Type: Media and Technology | Museum and Science Center Programs | Public Programs | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media