MUSTEL
Victor’s position paper
Double mediation of TEL in museums
Technology-enhanced learning in museums is mediated by two key types of artifacts:
museum artifacts and ICT systems. The main objective of ICT systems in museums is
supporting visitors’ meaningful activities mediated by museums artifacts. Therefore,
ICT should help bridge two distinct (if potentially overlapping) contexts: visitor’s
activity contexts and activity contexts implicitly contained in the artifact. Also, ICT
should be designed to address both advantages and disadvantages of museums as
places for learning.
Visitors and artifacts: Bridging activity contexts
In perfect accordance with its name, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach (in a
broad sense, that is, including activity theory) places learning and development in
cultural and historical contexts. Human beings learn and develop by appropriating
values, meanings, knowledge, and so forth, created by previous generations. Artifacts
play a special role in transmitting culture: as mediators of our activities they bring
with them accumulated experience of other people and thus make this experience
influence what we do. It is not an exaggeration to say that most informal learning is in
fact an appropriation of some kinds of artifacts. Learning the art of bicycle riding,
fishing, or chess can be described as learning to use such artifacts as bicycle, fishing
gear, or chess board and chess pieces. The artifacts appropriated by learners include
not only materials things, or primary artifacts (using Wartofsky’s terminology), but
also socially developed ways of using things, or secondary artifacts, such as King’s
Indian Defense in chess. .
Museums possess, probably, the most valuable artifacts on Earth. Therefore, the
potential of museums for learning and development is enormous. But museums as
places for learning also have serious disadvantages. In “everyday” informal learning
appropriation of artifacts is tightly integrated into activities of the learner. Learning
how to use fishing gear, for instance, is likely to take place within a meaningful social
context and be a part of a memorable personal experience. There is a close match
between two contexts: the context of individual’s interests, aspirations, goals, and
challenges, on the one hand, and the context of fishing as a culturally-historically
developed form of human practice, with its artifacts, rules of conduct, secrets of trade,
unwritten rules, and inherent values, on the other hand.
In museums these two contexts are typically dissociated from each other: visitors are
typically very restricted in what they can do in museums, while artifacts are to a large
degree displayed as decontextualized, separate objects.
Therefore, to make the educational and developmental potential of museums come
true, there is a need to (a) re-contextualize museum artifacts, render explicit and
accessible the latent contexts associated with the artifacts and (b) bridge visitors’
activity contexts and artifact-related contexts. In order to do that one needs to
systematically explore the two contexts. A preliminary “taxonomy” of the dimensions
of the visitor’s activity context and artifact-related contexts is as follows:
visitor
artifact
Visitor:
Motivation: entertainment, finding out about the “roots” (personal or national
identity), curiosity, socialization, formal learning, etc.
“Format” of the visit: browsing, focused exploration, searching for an answer
to a specific question, etc.
Social context: friends, family, teachers, curators, etc.
Tools available during the visit: mobile phones, digital cameras, loaned
mobile devices, etc.
Age group: pre-school children, school children, teenagers, adults, older
adults.
Artifact
use (how the artifact is supposed to be used),
design (why the artifact had been designed that particular way),
inner workings (how and why it works),
artifact evolution (in Henri Petroski’s sense),
life conditions of the A. time,
relation to the present (how the things are different now),
other related artifacts (e.g., paintings of the same artist),
politics,
production of the culture (cultural heritage),
stories behind this particular A.
etc
What are ICT systems in museums good for?
ICT is a tool, and it needs to be evaluated or designed in relation to the purpose of its
use. As argued above, the intended use of ICT in museum learning is bridging the gap
between (a) activity contexts associated with artifacts and (b) visitor’s own activities.
Since the focus here is on learning, ICT systems should help capitalize upon core
advantages – and cope with disadvantages -- of museums as places for learning. A
preliminary outline of such advantages and disadvantages is as follows:
Advantages
Authentic/ Different/ Unique (can be
found only in the museum)
Priceless
”Officially” recognized as valuable
Disadvantages
Fixed location/physical constraints/ Few
people can use at the same time
Limited hands-on experience/ Artifacts are
protected
Rules and norms of the environment limit
collaboration/ communication
To deal with both the advantages and disadvantages, a number of technological
solutions have been proposed in previous research on TEL in museums:
Verbal descriptions
Replicas/proxies
Narratives/ playacting
Trails/ annotations
etc
At the same time, technology was found to have some negative side effects:
Distraction
Being “alien”, not fitting well with the setting
Privacy violation
Intellectual property issues
Additonal constraints
etc
Implications for further reading
When analyzing existing research in the MUSTEL area I plan to focus on the
following aspects:
Visitors. What are the interests, goals, and needs of the visitors involved in the study?
What are the reasons why they came to the museum?
Learning. What artifacts are used in setting up educational activities? What are the
expected learning outcomes? What advantages of museums for learning are
capitalized upon in the study?
Problems. What limitations of (museum) learning are addressed in the study?
Technological affordances and solutions. How exactly did technology help address
the above problems?
Outcomes: learning. What did the visitors learn? What were the criteria and
procedures of assessment?
Outcomes: technology. Did the technology work as expected? Were there any
unanticipated benefits or negative side effects of technology?