@ UKMW2006 in Leicester: 6. How is museum learning provision adapting to the new web environment?

Anra Kennedy (24hr museum) chairs Marshall Mateer, Bruce Phillips and Helen Wright.



What schools need.

Marshall Mateer http://shapesoftime.net

case study: children mapping docks where Titanic was built (entering content with geopositioning).

challenge= orientation. where am i in relation to the information that i am taking in? how does it relate to me, and how do i evaluate its dimension/scale?

case study: Journey in Stone: Caedmon School Project from the Cleveland Iron Mines.

industrial heritage of area no longer in the community; mines are gone as is their central presence in the community. children are creating content, comfortable with technology.

study: cultural Resources: Mapping and Provision. Study for Becta, March 2006, asked

- what do you want

- how do you want it

- what do you want to do with it.... (pushed the re-use question)

--> flexible resources that teachers can adapt to their learners needs

(everything that's digitized available to all schools)

--> resources contextualised and represent the diversity and relevance of Britain and the World today.

--> less with context is better than more individual objects without interpretive layer

--> mapping with the curriculum is only one way to parse the content: global curriculum (redesign in multi-dimensional)

--> think of content as raw, cooked or pre-packaged (different levels of presentation and integration that are inter-connected; user can choose how they want to eat)

Bruce Phillips - ARKive

environment and wildlife films are about 5% of programming on tv

digital film archive made available for non-commercial use

focus on endangered species globally, and all species in Britain

- data on species linked to descriptive pages, and movie segments (30 seconds to 2 min)

but P is not for Panda -- (he's a GIANT panda... filed under 'G').

Helen Wright uses cultural material in her classroom (she teaches history); she's fantastic (knowledgeable, enthusiastic and engaged) and reminds me that museums need to see good teachers in action. She's encouraging kids to look, to develop hypotheses, to present, to collaborate, to build their own knowledge of the subject and communicate it with each other. She wants her seven-year olds to use museum web sites, search collections, and find material that they can understand and use. They're creating their own exhibitions, building knowledge as they make choices, create sequences and write context.

children can do it; can use the tools and need access to the content to support their creativity.