Collaborative virtual learning environments are providing new and exciting ways for museums to provide educational content. A major part of museums' role is providing contexts through which visitors can interact with, and better understand, museum collections.
For some, the task includes preserving the actual context in which the collection is housed, as at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury. For others, it is to recreate the context for the artefacts, as at the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Other museums display objects in ways that make visitors see connections between them - ordering collections by themes, chronology, functionality and so on.
Most museums are as much about the delivery of context and experience as they are about the storage and the preservation of collections. In the majority of cases this context is provided in real time and with the limitations of the physical space available. But collaborative virtual learning environments - such as interactive games - allow museums to reach beyond these boundaries.
The museum context serves several purposes. The most obvious is providing structures that help visitors to make connections between objects. Placing a painting by Turner next to one by Constable, for example, not only presents works by British painters in proximity to one another but also illustrates two different artistic approaches to visual representation and to the relative importance of light. Such placements help visitors compare and contrast styles.
Other contexts help the visitor construct the story behind the object. This may account in part for the popularity of displays of gold and alabaster artefacts that once lay deep within silent tombs. These raise questions such as: 'How did the lives represented here live? What happened to them?'
Other museum contexts are immersive. Standing under the chin of a towering brontosaurus can leave a lasting memory: 'Wow, I never knew a dinosaur could be so big! Look at the claws. They are as long as my leg.'
Museum contexts can also offer the visitor the chance to manipulate objects, allowing them to explore and experience results first-hand: 'Look, I can change the timing of the wave action. See, that really effects erosion.' Visitors enjoy constructing a personal understanding of what lies before them, towers over them or surrounds and envelops them.
But virtual learning environments can also provide context in similar ways, through structure, story, immersion, exploring objects and experiencing consequences.
The one area in which museums do not take full advantage of context is in building communities of learners. Most exhibits function best when experienced singly. Few exhibits encourage visitors to interact as a group - although there are exceptions such as the Virtual Fish Tank at the Boston Museum of Science, which encourages people to add their own fish creations to the tank and control fish schooling behaviour. The Energy Ring at the Science Museum, London, posts visitors' thoughts about energy on a giant overhead ring.
But even in these examples, visitors are still not joining forces to solve a common problem. They are expressing their opinions or making choices that are later displayed or enacted within the exhibit. The feedback loop is often too slow to allow visitors to experience the consequence of their actions, let alone respond to the actions of others in the hall.
In contrast, true collaborative environments permit people to work together to accomplish collective goals. These environments support multiple levels of learners, cooperative knowledge-building and feature a means for sharing what is learned. When these contexts exist in an internet or intranet computer system, they may take the shape of what are called multi-user virtual learning environments.
The learning is situated in a virtual context and many people can simultaneously experience, interact with, and contribute to, the virtual world and its visitors. At first glance these environments may resemble settings that exist in computer games. But, unlike entertainment-based games, they are firmly grounded in teaching and may be based on national standards for learning.
What does an online collaborative virtual learning environment look like? Although designed for school use, River City is a good example of an educational and fun experience that utilises museum artefacts in a fictional context based on fact. It is funded by the National Science Foundation, a US federal agency, and was developed at George Mason University and Harvard University's Graduate School of Education under the direction of Chris Dede and Timothy Wirth.
River City is a fictional 1880s American city built up around a river with different terrain features influencing water run-off and insect populations. Users manoeuvre through the virtual city environment in order to address a real-world problem: why are some citizens getting sick?
To investigate, users interact with virtual city residents; gather scientific evidence such as water samples; converse online with other users; and explore artefacts from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of American History and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology museum. Users work together to solve the problem and discover what is causing the residents to become ill.
Visitors can walk down streets, enter buildings, examine objects and documents, hear from residents, gather data, form hypotheses and conduct experiments. Users learn while they define their own pathway through an exploration of artefacts, processes and consequences, as if they were immersed in a real environment.
In River City, museum artefacts are essential information sources. They include historical photographs strategically placed within city buildings to provide pertinent historical information. Those on the walls of the university and hospital, for example, show actual conditions within hospitals at the time and scientific techniques and equipment used in the 1880s.
Inside the immersive context, River City weaves the story of the city's public health crisis. Users gather evidence to discover why inhabitants are getting sick, who is at greatest risk and how to stop the spread of the illness. This storyline provides an engaging motivation for users to move through River City collecting information to construct plausible hypotheses about the illness.
One source of information is the River City residents themselves. These computer-based agents supply titbits of historical and scientific information to enrich the user's picture of the city and its problems. For example, schoolboy Robert White lives in a tenement and tells users that he likes to play in the mud and has a friend, Jennifer, who is sick with a stomach ache.
As in other virtual environments, users share an electronic space in which their personas are represented by virtual characters. But unlike other environments, River City characters can act individually and work with each other within the virtual context by engaging in live chats.
Users listen in on conversations between local residents whose agents (bots) provide 'first-hand' information about life in River City. Users also can converse virtually with the characters of remote participants by chatting electronically to share discoveries, opinions and data.
Such collaboration supports a socially constructed learning process that is supported by other physically distant participants. The online chat feature allows a wide range of people to take part. Novices chat with expert museum curators and students chat with teachers. Younger participants learn from the experiences of older users. Home users work with museum visitors. Classmates or families collaborate.
River City is hosted by Activeworlds, which provides a platform for delivering real-time interactive 3D content over the web (www.activeworlds.com). The design offers the user a screen divided into three parts that can be viewed and used simultaneously. The first section (upper left) is the 3D virtual world context (River City itself).
Here, among other features, characters assume a variety of likenesses, transport themselves to join other character in various locations and fly to gain a birds-eye view of the terrain.
The second section (lower centre) is a chat window that enables written communication among multiple users as well as experts such as lecturers, curators and teachers. Here, users can direct questions to virtual environment agents; find and converse with other participants in real time; and hear and exchange ideas with experts and museum or education staff over distance when pre-arranged.
The third section (upper right) has a 2D web-link to further information provided within the program or to other related internet sites. Overall, the effect is an engaging environment for collaborative discovery and learning.
But the creation of such immersive community environments is not without its challenges. It can be tempting to incorporate only select features of virtual contexts and not fully engage the collaborative potential of the internet.
There are examples where visitors can move among objects within virtual galleries without ever interacting with anyone else (National Gallery of Art, Van Gogh virtual tour, www.nga.gov; Natural History Collection of the University of Edinburgh www.nhc.ed.ac.uk).
Many of these creations mimic the limitations of contexts within the actual museum itself. They fail to capitalise on the possibility of creating a collaborative environment in which people can combine efforts to accomplish a task, solve a problem or build a story.
Online communities of learners cannot develop in a void. They need support, structure, monitoring and feedback. Community environments often require rules and language filters to set the tone for appropriate behaviour and such support mechanisms require resources.
But they can also allow resources to be used more widely. For example, lecturers can be trained to monitor discussion groups, answer online questions and direct individuals to online resources. Guest experts and curators can make special online appearances for membership groups and schools.
A collaborative virtual environment where anyone can take on a role, be challenged, experience a story and contribute to a solution may be especially attractive to teenagers whose low number of visits to museums have been an ongoing concern. Understanding context through fun, cooperative interaction may encourage and enhance museum visits and build relationships not only between museums and schools but between museums and teens themselves.
Finally, collaborative virtual learning environments give museums the opportunity to show many objects that would otherwise remain in storage. The virtual space provides an alternative venue for the display and interaction with treasures that are away on loan or stored within museum vaults.
Although this is not an exhaustive list of the benefits and challenges, the basic tenet of sharing knowledge within a collaborative virtual learning context has the potential to make people feel connected as part of a community of learners and part of a museum community.
The online collaboration offers the rare chance for novices and experts to work together to find a solution or reach a goal. It supports the learning that is at the heart of many museum experiences; but it does so in an open, collective and collaborative manner that is often impossible to achieve on the museum floor.
The environment can incorporate a sound learning experience for one user, multiple users or a whole class of users working simultaneously and in concert with one another. The online component permits sharing what is learned - sharing across distance or across the room, between, and among, beginners and experts.
The development of collaborative virtual learning environments may begin to tap the rich potential of museums to become central forces in the development of true communities of learners of all ages.
Ilona Holland is an evaluator and lecturer at Harvard University, Massachusetts, and Barbara Flagg is the director of multimedia research at Bellport, New York
For some, the task includes preserving the actual context in which the collection is housed, as at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury. For others, it is to recreate the context for the artefacts, as at the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Other museums display objects in ways that make visitors see connections between them - ordering collections by themes, chronology, functionality and so on.
Most museums are as much about the delivery of context and experience as they are about the storage and the preservation of collections. In the majority of cases this context is provided in real time and with the limitations of the physical space available. But collaborative virtual learning environments - such as interactive games - allow museums to reach beyond these boundaries.
The museum context serves several purposes. The most obvious is providing structures that help visitors to make connections between objects. Placing a painting by Turner next to one by Constable, for example, not only presents works by British painters in proximity to one another but also illustrates two different artistic approaches to visual representation and to the relative importance of light. Such placements help visitors compare and contrast styles.
Other contexts help the visitor construct the story behind the object. This may account in part for the popularity of displays of gold and alabaster artefacts that once lay deep within silent tombs. These raise questions such as: 'How did the lives represented here live? What happened to them?'
Other museum contexts are immersive. Standing under the chin of a towering brontosaurus can leave a lasting memory: 'Wow, I never knew a dinosaur could be so big! Look at the claws. They are as long as my leg.'
Museum contexts can also offer the visitor the chance to manipulate objects, allowing them to explore and experience results first-hand: 'Look, I can change the timing of the wave action. See, that really effects erosion.' Visitors enjoy constructing a personal understanding of what lies before them, towers over them or surrounds and envelops them.
But virtual learning environments can also provide context in similar ways, through structure, story, immersion, exploring objects and experiencing consequences.
The one area in which museums do not take full advantage of context is in building communities of learners. Most exhibits function best when experienced singly. Few exhibits encourage visitors to interact as a group - although there are exceptions such as the Virtual Fish Tank at the Boston Museum of Science, which encourages people to add their own fish creations to the tank and control fish schooling behaviour. The Energy Ring at the Science Museum, London, posts visitors' thoughts about energy on a giant overhead ring.
But even in these examples, visitors are still not joining forces to solve a common problem. They are expressing their opinions or making choices that are later displayed or enacted within the exhibit. The feedback loop is often too slow to allow visitors to experience the consequence of their actions, let alone respond to the actions of others in the hall.
In contrast, true collaborative environments permit people to work together to accomplish collective goals. These environments support multiple levels of learners, cooperative knowledge-building and feature a means for sharing what is learned. When these contexts exist in an internet or intranet computer system, they may take the shape of what are called multi-user virtual learning environments.
The learning is situated in a virtual context and many people can simultaneously experience, interact with, and contribute to, the virtual world and its visitors. At first glance these environments may resemble settings that exist in computer games. But, unlike entertainment-based games, they are firmly grounded in teaching and may be based on national standards for learning.
What does an online collaborative virtual learning environment look like? Although designed for school use, River City is a good example of an educational and fun experience that utilises museum artefacts in a fictional context based on fact. It is funded by the National Science Foundation, a US federal agency, and was developed at George Mason University and Harvard University's Graduate School of Education under the direction of Chris Dede and Timothy Wirth.
River City is a fictional 1880s American city built up around a river with different terrain features influencing water run-off and insect populations. Users manoeuvre through the virtual city environment in order to address a real-world problem: why are some citizens getting sick?
To investigate, users interact with virtual city residents; gather scientific evidence such as water samples; converse online with other users; and explore artefacts from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of American History and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology museum. Users work together to solve the problem and discover what is causing the residents to become ill.
Visitors can walk down streets, enter buildings, examine objects and documents, hear from residents, gather data, form hypotheses and conduct experiments. Users learn while they define their own pathway through an exploration of artefacts, processes and consequences, as if they were immersed in a real environment.
In River City, museum artefacts are essential information sources. They include historical photographs strategically placed within city buildings to provide pertinent historical information. Those on the walls of the university and hospital, for example, show actual conditions within hospitals at the time and scientific techniques and equipment used in the 1880s.
Inside the immersive context, River City weaves the story of the city's public health crisis. Users gather evidence to discover why inhabitants are getting sick, who is at greatest risk and how to stop the spread of the illness. This storyline provides an engaging motivation for users to move through River City collecting information to construct plausible hypotheses about the illness.
One source of information is the River City residents themselves. These computer-based agents supply titbits of historical and scientific information to enrich the user's picture of the city and its problems. For example, schoolboy Robert White lives in a tenement and tells users that he likes to play in the mud and has a friend, Jennifer, who is sick with a stomach ache.
As in other virtual environments, users share an electronic space in which their personas are represented by virtual characters. But unlike other environments, River City characters can act individually and work with each other within the virtual context by engaging in live chats.
Users listen in on conversations between local residents whose agents (bots) provide 'first-hand' information about life in River City. Users also can converse virtually with the characters of remote participants by chatting electronically to share discoveries, opinions and data.
Such collaboration supports a socially constructed learning process that is supported by other physically distant participants. The online chat feature allows a wide range of people to take part. Novices chat with expert museum curators and students chat with teachers. Younger participants learn from the experiences of older users. Home users work with museum visitors. Classmates or families collaborate.
River City is hosted by Activeworlds, which provides a platform for delivering real-time interactive 3D content over the web (www.activeworlds.com). The design offers the user a screen divided into three parts that can be viewed and used simultaneously. The first section (upper left) is the 3D virtual world context (River City itself).
Here, among other features, characters assume a variety of likenesses, transport themselves to join other character in various locations and fly to gain a birds-eye view of the terrain.
The second section (lower centre) is a chat window that enables written communication among multiple users as well as experts such as lecturers, curators and teachers. Here, users can direct questions to virtual environment agents; find and converse with other participants in real time; and hear and exchange ideas with experts and museum or education staff over distance when pre-arranged.
The third section (upper right) has a 2D web-link to further information provided within the program or to other related internet sites. Overall, the effect is an engaging environment for collaborative discovery and learning.
But the creation of such immersive community environments is not without its challenges. It can be tempting to incorporate only select features of virtual contexts and not fully engage the collaborative potential of the internet.
There are examples where visitors can move among objects within virtual galleries without ever interacting with anyone else (National Gallery of Art, Van Gogh virtual tour, www.nga.gov; Natural History Collection of the University of Edinburgh www.nhc.ed.ac.uk).
Many of these creations mimic the limitations of contexts within the actual museum itself. They fail to capitalise on the possibility of creating a collaborative environment in which people can combine efforts to accomplish a task, solve a problem or build a story.
Online communities of learners cannot develop in a void. They need support, structure, monitoring and feedback. Community environments often require rules and language filters to set the tone for appropriate behaviour and such support mechanisms require resources.
But they can also allow resources to be used more widely. For example, lecturers can be trained to monitor discussion groups, answer online questions and direct individuals to online resources. Guest experts and curators can make special online appearances for membership groups and schools.
A collaborative virtual environment where anyone can take on a role, be challenged, experience a story and contribute to a solution may be especially attractive to teenagers whose low number of visits to museums have been an ongoing concern. Understanding context through fun, cooperative interaction may encourage and enhance museum visits and build relationships not only between museums and schools but between museums and teens themselves.
Finally, collaborative virtual learning environments give museums the opportunity to show many objects that would otherwise remain in storage. The virtual space provides an alternative venue for the display and interaction with treasures that are away on loan or stored within museum vaults.
Although this is not an exhaustive list of the benefits and challenges, the basic tenet of sharing knowledge within a collaborative virtual learning context has the potential to make people feel connected as part of a community of learners and part of a museum community.
The online collaboration offers the rare chance for novices and experts to work together to find a solution or reach a goal. It supports the learning that is at the heart of many museum experiences; but it does so in an open, collective and collaborative manner that is often impossible to achieve on the museum floor.
The environment can incorporate a sound learning experience for one user, multiple users or a whole class of users working simultaneously and in concert with one another. The online component permits sharing what is learned - sharing across distance or across the room, between, and among, beginners and experts.
The development of collaborative virtual learning environments may begin to tap the rich potential of museums to become central forces in the development of true communities of learners of all ages.
Ilona Holland is an evaluator and lecturer at Harvard University, Massachusetts, and Barbara Flagg is the director of multimedia research at Bellport, New York
