Museum Studies

By taking Berlin as an example, this paper will focus on questions of commemorating and representing history of the Holοcaust as a constructive process that is strongly connected to the circumstances of the present. It will question the social role of National Museums in Germany by presenting different examples, which respond directly to the German Government's ambition of encouraging civil courage and democracy. By presenting examples of smaller, more biographical National Museums like the Museum Workshop for the Blind that focus on the resistance to National Socialism by using authentic places and telling one individual story, the paper will question and rethink the role of National Museums and their possible impact on positive social and global changes with respect specifically to the German identity-finding process. Due to the fact that the Holocaust is not the focus of my PhD research, I will draw upon my experiences in working in the Jewish Museum Berlin for four years. Then, rather than presenting results, the paper will conclude with open questions for further discussion.

MyArtSpace is a service on mobile phones for enquiry-led museum learning. It enables students to create their own interpretations of museum visits through descriptions of objects, images and sounds. These are automatically transmitted to a personal online gallery that they can use to reflect upon and share their experience. This paper describes the Lifecycle evaluations of MyArtSpace, throughout the design and deployment stages.

We review the research on mobile learning and theories of learning in order to produce a pedagogically sound set of guidelines for learners, teachers, and policy makers who are considering adopting m-learning technology. The guidelines are not primarily intended as requirements for systems design, but they will be of use to systems designers, in alerting them to the settings in which the technology will be used and issues arising from deployment with teachers and learners. The paper offers an interpretation of the nature and utility of the guidelines, and describes a process for producing new guidelines. We propose an initial set of guidelines for deploying, managing and teaching with mobile technology.

We propose six challenges in evaluating mobile learning: capturing and analysing learning in context and across contexts, measuring mobile learning processes and outcomes, respecting learner/participant privacy, assessing mobile technology utility and usability, considering the wider organisational and socio-cultural context of learning, and assessing in/formality. A three-level framework for evaluating mobile learning is proposed, comprising a micro level concerned with usability, a meso level concerned with the learning experience, and a macro level concerned with integration within existing educational and organisational contexts. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the framework meets the evaluation challenges and with suggestions for further extensions.

We report the main findings of the final evaluation study of the MyArtSpace project. MyArtSpace is a combined mobile phone and web-based service to support learning between schools and museums. On arriving for a museum visit the children are loaned mobile phones running the MyArtSpace software. They can view multimedia presentations of museum exhibits, take photos, make voice recordings, write notes and see who else has viewed the exhibit. After each action, the content is automatically transmitted over the phone connection to a website which stores a personal record of their visit. Back in the classroom they can review their visit and the media they have collected, share material with other children and create presentations. MyArtSpace has been deployed in three museums for a year-long trial during which over 3000 school students used the service, on organised visits from local schools. The final user study took place in one museum during November 2006, with a group of twenty-three students aged 11-14 and their teachers. It covered usability, educational and organisational issues, through focus groups, observational studies, questionnaire surveys, and face to face, telephone and email interviews. The study showed that MyArtSpace had a positive impact on school museum visits, and identified areas for improvement in the technical and educational aspects of the service.

A phenomenological study of personal experiential learning was conducted. This informed a descriptive Framework of Lifelong Learning (FoLL) which describes four facets of lifelong learning: the learner, the organisation of learning, the process for carrying out learning projects, and the breakdowns that occur during, or because of, learning.

This paper presents a description and evaluation of Myartspace, a service on mobile phones for inquiry-led learning that allows students to gather information during a school field trip which is automatically sent to a website where they can view, share and present it, back in the classroom or at home. The evaluation focused on three levels: a micro level, concerned with issues of usability; a meso level, which examined educational effectiveness in terms of learning breakthroughs and breakdowns; and a macro level, which looked at the impact of the new technology on school museum visits practice. Issues of implementing mobile learning across school and museum settings are identified and cross-level influences are discussed. The study showed that the service was effective in enabling students to gather information in a museum and this provided resources for effective construction and reflection in the classroom. Minor usability problems did not detract from the learning, however there are significant issues concerning how to structure the visit and on the viability of Myartspace as a regular service.

We propose a set of general requirements for the design of Lifelong Learning Organisers (LLOs), based on our studies of personal learning practices. The studies showed [1] that learning activity is mobile between locations, time slots, and topic areas. Moreover, learning follows a hierarchical organization at three operational levels: learning activities are discrete acts, which are grouped to form learning episodes, which in turn are grouped to form learning projects. Objects are used in the process of carrying out learning activities, episodes and projects, which the learner organises based on a personal organisation system. On the way, the learner constructs personal, meaningful knowledge. We describe KLeOS, an example of a system to organise such knowledge over long periods of time.

Over the past 10 years mobile learning has grown from a minor research interest to a set of significant projects in schools, workplaces, museums, cities and rural areas around the world. Each project has shown how mobile technology can offer new opportunities for learning that extend within and beyond the traditional teacher-led classroom. Yet, the very diversity of the projects

Over the past ten years mobile learning has grown from a minor research interest to a set of significant projects in schools, workplaces, museums, cities and rural areas around the world. Each project has shown how mobile technology can offer new opportunities for learning that extend within and beyond the traditional teacher-led classroom. Yet, the very diversity of the projects makes it difficult to capture the essence of mobile learning or to show how it contributes to the theory and practice of education. This chapter attempts to address the central issues of what is mobile learning and how can it be designed and evaluated. Drawing on a theory of mobile learning as "the processes of coming to know through conversations across multiple contexts amongst people and personal interactive technologies" (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2007, p. 225), we discuss how learning contexts are created through interaction, and how portable and ubiquitous technologies can support effective conversations for learning. We draw on the findings from recent major projects to show how people artfully engage with their surroundings, peers and technology to create impromptu sites of learning and to carry their conversations from place to place, from time to time, from topic to topic.

We propose Lifelong Learning Organisers (LLOs) as tools to support the capturing, organisation and retrieval of personal learning experiences, resources and notes, over a range of learning topics, at different times and places. The paper discusses general requirements for the design of LLOs based on findings from a diary-based study of everyday learning practice; and also based on the design and evaluation of KLeOS, a prototype LLO that supports learning projects, episodes and activities through the linking of learning content with semantic and episodic context. We suggest that LLOs should assist in capturing both the episodic and the semantic aspects of learning events, and should incorporate retrieval mechanisms that utilise both types of memory (i.e. episodic and semantic) to assist tracing back knowledge and resources. Issues for future research on LLOs are also discussed.