Connecting with Classrooms through Computers

Museums find electronic publishing to be an increasingly useful tool for distributing information to a wide variety of audiences. Teachers find the Internet and CD-ROMs to be increasingly useful tools for bringing a wide variety of information into their classrooms. These tools represent an enormous opportunity to realize educational goalsof museums and schools.
Yet, creating electronic content for educational use is not a straightforward process of converting existing printed matenals into digital ones. And hypertext, virtual reality, and streamed audio are not used by knowledgeable electronic classroom teachers as passive information delivery devices replacing film strips and video. Digital materials, whatever their content, are manipulated, indexed and re-contextualized by teachers and students in the process of computer-ased learning. In order for their digital information to have a maximum educational impact. museums should be aware of the profound changes that have occurred and continue to occur in the classroom of today and tomorrow. This paper will discuss these pedagogical changes and ways in which museums can organize their electronic publications to be useful for a variety of computer-based learning experiences.