The Future of Museums

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame orinially uploaded to Flickr on July 10, 2006by ricardo.martins

Over the past two weeks ABC Radio National's 'Future Tense' have aired about 'The Future of Museums'. One of the things that came across strongly in both Part 1 and Part 2 was the need for greater collaboration between curatorial, education and public program staff in museums to ensure that we communicate the 'magic' of collections in a way that is accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harriet.

So props to us...we are on the right track!

Caz

The Learning Federation Pilot Project

Sorry there hasn't been a post for a while. I have been wading through The Learning Federation Museum & Educational Content Exchange Final Report. At 122 pages it is an detailed review of the TLF's pilot project between the Powerhouse, Museum Victoria, National Museum of Australia and 15 primary and secondary schools from Victoria, South Australa, New South Wales and Tasmania.

The report provides an overview of the processes and systems TLF used to procure, quality assure and deliver content made available by the museums for education users. It also analyses the ways in which teachers and students engaged with the TLF's interactive online environment, Scootle Sandbox.

The results at an upper level are very encouraging with over 92% of teachers and 82% of students agreeing that the 'online learning environment and its collaborative tools assisted students learning'. The finer detail, however, reveals the expected gaps between museum, educator and TLF understanding and expectations.

Reading this document alongside the VCN2 FUSE GOTME document it is clear that DEECD have taken on board and tried to remedy many of the stumbling blocks of the TLF Pilot. This should be very comforting for our VCN2 team! Improvements include the ability for contributor to provide greatly reduced metadata sets for learning object (which is much more in line with how museums do things) and a more self-regulatory quality assurance regime.

If you are interested in dipping into the document you I'd suggest reading the section entitled 'What the case studies tell us' and appendices 1-3 for specific examples on online collaborative activities created by the teachers. Appendix 5 also provides a good list of online references.

So there it is, another boring but strangely fascinating report summarised for you!

Caz