11th Baltic Region Seminar on Engineering Education
Tallinn, Estonia, 18-20 June 2007
 2007 UICEE
History, philosophy, and computer science – How to bring them together to develop an
outstanding eLearning tool for a museum
J. Mohnke & J. Sieck
Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft – Universtity od Applied Sciences
Berlin, Germany
ABSTRACT: In this paper, we introduce the project EMIKA. EMIKA is a joint project between the Jewish Museum Berlin and the
University of Applied Sciences FHTW Berlin in which a mobile information system for the museum has to be developed. Therefore,
work in completely different areas has to be done in parallel and people with a completely different scientific background have to
work together. After introducing the tasks EMIKA has to solve we evaluate interviews made with team members and talk about our
experiences in finding ways to communicate within the team. All in all we want to give a contribution to a special focus of
engineering education – teaching abilities to help engineers to understand what potentially non-technical co-workers do and to
explain to non-engineers what engineers do. These skills are necessary to find a common language in multidisciplinary projects and
to plan and coordinate all tasks. Last but not least they help to establish a pleasant working atmosphere – preconditions that must not
be underestimated to be able to work successfully.
.
INTRODUCTION
orientation in the building and in the exhibition itself.
Furthermore, there are subject areas that are not sufficiently
covered like the 20th century and current Jewish culture.
Visitors often are interested in Jewish places in the city of
Berlin as well – how to get there, what to see there. EMIKA
wants to fill these gaps with developing special learning
strategies and implement them using an indoor and outdoor
mobile information system.
“Good things have to be planed. The bad once happen by
themselves.”
Philip B. Crosby (1926-2001), quality management expert [10]
Learning and studying with modern information and
communication technologies has not only find its way into
engineering, business, and natural sciences but also into many
fields of culture and art. Computer kiosks in permanent
exhibitions, audio guides, and websites have their place in the
presentation concept of many galleries and museums around
the world.
We are going to talk about our first experiences within the
work of EMIKA, about practical, organizational and other
challenges. Especially those problems will be discussed which
are interesting for engineers working in multidisciplinary teams
of scientists, like how to coordinate the different types of work
to get the results you want, how to apply what you have
learned studying computer science to a special topic (like
education and information in a museum), or how to talk with
each other. In our opinion, those aspects should play one major
role when training engineers for their different practical
assignments after their study.
In this paper we want to introduce the work of a joint project
between the Jewish Museum Berlin and the University of
Applied Sciences FHTW Berlin. The project is called EMIKA
which is an abbreviation for the German title “ Entwicklung
multimedialer, dynamischer Museumsinformationssysteme mit
integrierten Funktionen zur Interaktion mit digitalen
Kunstobjekten, individueller Ausstellungskataloggenerierung
und Einbeziehung von Dienstleistungsangeboten”.
Let us try to translate this; not word by word but by its
meaning. EMIKA stands for 14 scientists: historians and
philosophers specialized in different fields of Judaism, a
designer, and computer scientists. Moreover, EMIKA is going
to be the host for different project works for students studying
Applied Computer Science at FHTW Berlin. Since the
beginning of this year we work together to design and to build
a mobile information system for the Jewish Museum in Berlin
(http://juedisches-museum-berlin.de). The museum opened its
doors in September 2001. Since then, it has been, with over 3,7
millions of visitors so far, one of the most popular places to see
in Berlin. As visitor surveys show, people enjoy the
architecture of the museum as well as the exhibition a lot.
However, they often complain about missing help for
EMIKA – STEP BY STEP TO AN INFORMATION
SYSTEM USING MULTIMEDIA
The goal of the EMIKA project is to develop a mobile
information system for visitors of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin. The idea is to guide a visitor through the exposition by
telling her stories as a human guide would do. Therefore, the
visitor might use a handheld rented by the museum or even her
own handheld. Furthermore, it wants to give a visitor the
possibility to prepare a visit via internet from home, to collect
interesting information during the visit, and to deepen the
experience afterwards by gaining even more information and
collecting them on a personal website or printing out special
catalog material. Also tours to places of Jewish history and
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remembrance in Berlin shall be provided by the information
system. All parts of this system will be connected by a
common database using a wireless data network technique to
transfer data to the respective handheld of a visitor. Last but
not least, a service function which helps a visitor to find
orientation in the building of the Jewish Museum is planed to
be provided (see Figure 1 for a visualization of these ideas).
tasks within the project more clearly: how much service work
for the content team can be done without losing sight of the
actual task? Experience: communication – talking and listening
is the mother of success. Everybody has to bring in his/her
strength and must not forget his/her rule in the game.
Step 4: Continue to work. This is where we are right now.
Right on the way of implementing a first prototype for an
indoor guide for the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
THE DAILY CHALLENGE OF MULTIDICIPLINARITY –
FIRST EXPERIENCES AND OPINIONS
After the first three month of project work we interviewed
members of the EMIKA team to find out more about their
personal opinions regarding to working within a
multidisciplinary project. Note, that for most if not for all of
them this has been the first multidisciplinary working
experience.
Interestingly, the content researchers and the designer that
answered our questions said that they appreciate the empathy
of the IT team to contribute to the success of the project by
explaining things and that they still benefit from the
introducing survey over IT problems regarding to the EMIKA
project.
They said, for them, the most important part is communication.
Figure 1: The EMIKA Information System
On our way to realize such a system we have gone the
following steps so far.
Let us consider the IT view of multidiciplinarity after three
month of work. At first, we asked a more social question,
which is:
Step 0: The IT team of EMIKA meets in conclave together
with other computer scientists from FHTW to become familiar
with the topic and to collect preliminary work experiences
made at FHTW that could be used for the project. By listening
to the experiences of others, first strategies are discussed about
how to work with multidicisplinarity . The conclusion is: We
need to take care of, that completely different working styles
and knowledge backgrounds have to be joined in the project.
We are going to offer training sessions to our non-computer
science co-workers to get them more familiar with our fields of
working. Moreover, we are going to ask the content researchers
in our group to teach us about their fields of work.
What advice would you give computer scientists to prepare
their work in multidisciplinary projects?
The following overlook about the given answers speaks for
itself:
-
Step 1: Content meets IT. This is the phase of introducing to
each other, exchanging first ideas and former experiences. The
IT team introduces itself by giving an overview about all
techniques that will play a rule in the information system, and
about what has to be considered when developing content for
such a mobile information system.
-
Step 2: Evaluating other approaches. By reading different
articles (for example, [1], [4], [5]) and visiting museums with
interesting audio or multimedia using mobile guides, each with
one content researcher and one computer scientist involved to
get the two sides of the story. The results of these evaluations
are presented to the whole group.
Improve and increase the personal willingness for
communication.
Be prepared to talk to people with a different technical
knowledge, which means work on trying to find a
common language and having the patience and
appreciation to clarify difficulties in understanding not
at once but over a longer period of time.
Avoid to be a total “Nerd” which means be open and
interested in things that the others do.
Be respectful of gaps in the IT-knowledge of noncomputer scientist and try to fill these gaps (for
example by providing training courses non-computer
scientists within the team).
The willingness for cooperative learning and problem solving
are key attitudes for any engineer in any project and they are
especially important when working together with nonengineers.
For all computer scientists asked for their opinion the EMIKA
project has been the first or second practical working
experience after their study at FHTW in Berlin. So, we also
wanted to know how good they have felt prepared for the
challenge of multidiciplinarity by asking:
Step 3: The hard part has just begun. Content team needs to
know more about IT preliminaries. The IT team needs to know
more about tour concepts and how they will be realized. Both
aspects have to be brought together for defining design
concepts. The IT team supports this process by giving
presentations of technology solutions that might be useful for
the realization of the system. Furthermore, it has to clarify its
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What abilities acquired during your study are helpful for the
work with your non-engineering co-workers? What do you
miss?
multidisciplinary projects when entering the world of
employment is pretty high.
Here are the answers regarding to:
ACKNOWLEGMENTS
- project management in general:
(+) The abilities learnt in project works together with other
students of computer science, in internships, and other
practical working experiences are very helpful.
(-) However, non or just a minimum amount of
multidisciplinary work was done during the study (if so,
then mostly be accident).
EMIKA is supported by the European Union, ESF2006000807. We also would like to thank all members of the
EMIKA team for sharing their opinions and experiences with
respect to the multidisciplinary of our project with us.
REFERENCES
1. M. Schwarzer, Art & Gadgetry – The Future of the
Museums Visit, Museums News, (July/August 2001).
- software engineering in general:
(+) The abilities learnt to use different techniques (like
UML or Entity relationship modelling) to discuss
functional specifications with non-engineers and to specify
accumulating work can be used to talk in a “common
language” with each other.
(-) On both sides, the missing knowledge about the actual
amount of work for different steps when solving a specific
task and about the fact how much time it needs to establish
a common basis for work is obvious.
2. Van Setten, Mark; Pokraev, Stanislav; Koolwaaij, Johan
(2004): “Context-Aware Recommendations in the Mobile
Tourist Application COMPASS”. In Proceedings of
Adaptive Hypermedia 2004 (pp. 235-244). Eindhoven
3. Turowski, Klaus; Pousttchi, Kery, Mobile Commerce:
Grundlagen und Techniken, Springer, Berlin 2004
4. Exploratorium Electronic
Francisco (January 2005).
- presentation techniques:
(+) How to present own ideas, project results, knowledge
was taught in a learning by doing manner during study and
has been now very helpful in practical work.
(-) The ability to explain the own know how to people
without a respective background is very individual.
Guide
Book
Forum,
San
5. N.Proctor, Off Base or on Target? Pros and Cons of
Wireless and location-aware applications in the museum,
Proceedings of the ICHIM, Paris, (September 2005).
6. A. Fiedler, M. A. Herzog, J. Sieck. Mobile Information
Systems and Mobile Learning. In: Is information technology shaping the future of higher education? Proceedings of
the 12th Internatonal Conference of European University
Information Systems, 347-353 (2006)
The answers clearly show, that educating future engineers in
the different parts of project work has been well done.
However, multidisciplinarity was not part of the curriculum.
All computer scientists interviewed would wish for more
practical experiences with multidisciplinarity
7. J. Sieck, M.Herzog. Kultur und Informatik- Entwickler,
Architekten und Gestalter der Informationsgesellschaft.
Peter Lang Verlag (2006)
8. Herzog, M., Fiedler, A., Halbach, C., Sieck, J. (2006):
Mobile Broker Platform. Positions- und situationsbezogene
Auswahl und Nutzung multimedialer Dienste. In
»Multimediale Technologien-Multimedia im E-Business
und in der Bildung« Verlag Peter Lang 2006
CONCLUSIONS
The facts that we have presented in this paper might be
common sense. As for EMIKA, all team members have
brought into the project their specific knowledge and
enthusiasm to build an outstanding mobile information system
for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. What we all have had to
practice now is to talk to the others and to listen finding ways
to figure out the problems that we have to solve together. For
the computer scientists of the project, this means on one hand
to explain technical things easily to their content researchers to
get them used to the matter they work out their tours for.
However, on the other hand they have to clarify the amount of
work necessary to find solutions for specific problems and for
implementation tasks (Not everything that can be easily
explained can also be done in a minute.). There are no recipes
for this. The way is learning by doing. EMIKA is an
environment where those abilities can be practised in an open
and relaxed atmosphere. What, if the situation is different -dead lines might be close, customers might be difficult.
We think it is important to focus the interest of engineering
education to those abilities since anybody who is involved in
the training of engineers should be aware of there importance.
Engineers should have possibilities to get their practical
experiences with multidiciplinarity during their study time
already. This is especially important in fields like computer
science, where the probability to be involved in
9. J.E. Amadi-Echendu. Cognitive styles and curricula for
training technical knowledge workers. In Proccedings of
the 10th UICEE Annual Conference on Engineering
Education (2007).
10. McK Wissen 20 – Das Magazin von McKinsey. 6. Jahrgang
März
UICEE Annual Confernce on Engineering
Education (März 2007).
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