Models for a New Visitor-Centered Museum: Using the Web to Create Community and Continuity for the Museum Visitor

Larry Friedlander, Stanford University

• web sites can be used to foster communication and discussion between members of the public, as well as between museum professionals and individual visitors

• visitors can form special interest groups and organize activities and projects on their own that connect to the museum

• web sites can be used to collect information about the public, and to respond to special needs and questions

• museums can begin to track the visitor's relationship to the museum over time, and to help the visitor record and re-use museum experiences

• visitors can create portfolios of museum materials, together with notes, commentary, and personal reflections

• museums can form special relationships with members or specific groups, providing these groups with personalized information such as videos and annotated texts, announcements, and marketing offers

I will now describe the Stanford Learning lab and its major efforts in these areas.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY LEARNING LAB

The Lab sponsors research in learning itself and the technologies and curricular structures that best support that learning. In particular, the Lab focuses on the judicious application of pedagogically informed learning technology, closely analyzing the interactions between pedagogy and technology in learning and avoiding any simplistic reliance on technical innovation for its own sake.. Situated outside any discipline and departmental boundaries, the SLL serves as a strategic center and advisor for the university as a whole, testing educational options in order to inform, guide, and give early warning to those in the university who must respond to the changing educational environment. The SLL focuses on how learning actually happens at Stanford.

The Learning Lab's most notable characteristic is its emphasis on the deep assessment of real learning (and associated teaching) activity together with the formal assessment of the impact of technology. So the Lab will develop stringent and comprehensive assessment protocols to accurately determine the effectiveness any new strategies and to ensure that its successful experiments can be repeated and expanded

MAKING COMMUNITIES OUT OF AN ANONYMOUS PUBLIC

Freshman here at Stanford, and elsewhere for that matter, typically spend much of their time in courses that combine lectures to large audiences with small discussion groups taught by junior instructors or advanced students, a format that poses important motivational and curricular problems. The scale of the class makes coordination of discussions and lectures difficult and discourages communication and collaboration among students and faculty. The result is often an apathetic and alienated student group.

The Intro. to Hum class is one of the first versions of a new format for a required Freshman course designed to replace the current Culture Values and Civilization series. The course, with ninety students, is team-taught by three faculty from diverse disciplines and two instructors who lead the discussion sections. The curriculum stresses close attention to a few selected and exemplary texts approached from of variety of view-points: i.e. history, literature, and philosophy. Thus the course emphasizes methods of reading, rather than content. By 1999 all entering freshman will take some version of this new course.

The Lab has designed a new kind of lecture course, one that retains the basic format of lecture and discussion but that transforms the passive student body into an active community of engaged participants. This transformation is achieved through a mix of new curricular formats and innovative applications of web-based technologies. Innovations include cross-section group projects; web-based, dynamic, and on-going assessment and feedback systems; and computer-mediated discussions among faculty and students. The technology has been carefully designed to merge with and support the new forms of teaching and curricular organization.

For example, in this course all works are studied twice--the first time the focus is on discussion within discrete sections of the individual works; the second time students engage in a series of examinations of groups of the texts and form on their own cross-sectional collaborations and projects. Students are invited to structure the second half of the course, taking part in lectures and defining areas of debate and analysis.

The lab has developed a series of web-based tools and formats for the course which:

• Presents the resources, tutorials and assignments for the course, allowing personalized study,

• Collects, distributes, archives and displays all student work,

• Supports intra- and inter-sectional on-line discussion,

• Alerts and announces course events,

• Displays collaborative notebooks for use by student groups doing projects,

• Collects and organizes each student's work

This web-based, cross-platform system supports close interactions and feedback among faculty and students as they carry out projects, assignments and discussions. It accommodates sharing of documents within and across working groups; delivery of alerts, schedules and announcements; asynchronous and synchronous peer-to-peer and novice-expert discussion, planning and argumentation; development of collaborative notebooks and project records; peer critique and publication of student experiments in "Course Journals," archiving of student work, and data collection with tools that record and help to analyze student activities. This system also maintains an archive of previous students' work allowing new students to draw on the experiences of earlier learners in planning experiments and projects. Finally, the system facilitates coordination and assessment of individual, small group, project, section, and large group course activities. Instructors will be able to capture, critique, and document activities and personal work on an ongoing basis, and these data will provide us with the means for a comprehensive assessment program and for ongoing, formative evaluation.

In summary, the potential tools useful to museums would be:

• Forums: To support asynchronous on-line discussion. The system displays images of the discussant, provides multiple layers of organizational categories, indexes messages in a summary view, and makes reading easier by visually organizing the screen for comprehensibility.

• Alerting and Announcement System: Used to post messages to members of selected groups or all the public visitors. It allows the museum to select from active (e-mail based) and/or passive (web-based) distribution.

• Assignment Distribution and Submission Systems: Allows museum to develop on-line educational activities that can automatically collect and route public response and work. Such work can be done directly on the Web, or using other applications such as word processors, CAD, or drawing programs.

• Work Collections: public to view and review their own and other visitor's contributions that have been collected along with comments from the museum staff. The collection can include both formal and informal postings. Collections can be used for knowledge sharing among learners, reflection upon one's previous contributions and assessment by museum staff.

• Authentication System: Used to password the course site so that private and fair use information can be included on web pages.

E-FOLIOS

• the reuse, reflection, integration (synthesis) and sharing of knowledge;

• the development of life-long learning skills and attitudes.

• individual learners to capture, organize, integrate and reuse the results of formal and informal learning experiences;

• educators to assess students and share teaching resources in order to provide students with guidance and rich learning opportunities within appropriate and innovative pedagogical frameworks;

• learning communities to share and manage information and to facilitate distributed, collaborative and cost-effective learning.

The Electronic Learning Portfolios (E-folios) is intended to help individuals capture, organize, integrate and re-use the results of learning experiences encountered throughout their careers. E-folios can contribute significantly to improvements in personalized, collaborative learning while also supporting a variety of student learning styles.

E-folios are ubiquitous, portable electronic knowledge bases that are private, personalized and sharable. They contain and represent one's own formal and informal learning experience At the same time, E-folio content can be selectively shared, thereby creating an unlimited constellation of larger communities with common understandings and experience. Such communities can range in scale from pair relationships to teams of several persons through to enterprise-wide frameworks.

NEW SPACES FOR LEARNING AND FOR ACTIVITIES

In its capacity as a laboratory for innovative curricular design, it will serve as a workshop for faculty to devise and test new teaching strategies, new digital applications and experiments, and new forms of student initiated research.

The Learning Space departs from traditional classroom design by allowing the learner and instructor to configure the facility for the activity, the research goals and the special needs of individual learners. Its design flows from the Stanford Learning Lab's conviction that students' understanding and appreciation of the arts, science, and technology is greatly enhanced in environments which:

• Allow students to 'own' or personalize individual and groups spaces.

• Support hands-on educational experiences. These experiences include running experiments, dissecting physical artifacts, creating design solutions, collaborating over the Internet, giving formal presentations, and the direct manipulation of physical artifacts.

• Support a variety of learning activities from lecture/discussion, to group design work and collaboration learning models, to lab experiments. It will allow for easy transition from small-group to large-group activities, even within a single class period.

• Combine formal education with informal and spontaneous learning in a communal setting.

• Support the presentation and collection of students' work and concepts in a gallery-like atmosphere. We see educational value in students displaying and reviewing the work of others.

• Lightweight, moveable furniture that allows the space to be easily reconfigured from a seminar table, to a to a design-planning-brainstorming area, to lab benches. In the lab bench configuration there will be access to tools, physical resource materials, a white board, and a storage locker. It is critical that the set-up time of the physical space to move students from small group work to formal presentations be minimal.

• Systems for displaying student work and physical /virtual artifacts. This will be accomplished with many large white boards, bulletin boards, cabinets, and several bright, large-screen projection systems showing computer and video displays on several walls. The projectors will show student work, re-present past learning activities, and visually configure the room for special tasks.

• Ubiquitous, high-speed networking: computers can be connected to the network from anywhere in the room.

• Computers artfully inserted in the environment so they do not inhibit discussion; for example, imbedded screens in special furniture and lab equipment.

CONCLUSION