KCLNHM Collaborative Studentship Sarah Kounaves How do adult visitors use mobile technologies in museum settings and how might these technologies be changing the visitors engagement and learning experiences ID: 356629
Download Presentation The PPT/PDF document "Museum Learning in the Digital Age: Unde..." is the property of its rightful owner. Permission is granted to download and print the materials on this web site for personal, non-commercial use only, and to display it on your personal computer provided you do not modify the materials and that you retain all copyright notices contained in the materials. By downloading content from our website, you accept the terms of this agreement.
Slide1
Museum Learning in the Digital Age: Understanding adult mobile technology use at a Natural History Museum
KCL/NHM Collaborative Studentship
Sarah KounavesSlide2
How do adult visitors use mobile technologies in museum settings, and how might
these technologies be changing the visitors’ engagement and learning experiences?Slide3
Research Questions
How do adult visitors normally address their own learning motivations in the museum, and how
might mobile devices change the way visitors engage with and learn from exhibitions while in the museum?
What does
learning and engagement
facilitated by a mobile device look like in a
museum
context?
How do adults naturalistically use mobile technologies in a museum context?Slide4
MethodsSlide5
Preliminary ResultsSlide6
In an open ended question asking visitors what they thought it meant to use their mobile device to learn while at the museum, visitors responded primarily with references to “google” and responses such as “looking stuff up on my phone”
Although visitors were primarily (96.7%) visiting the museum because of social motivations, 76.7% of the visitors also cited intellectual motivations for visiting.
Preliminary ResultsSlide7
Research Questions
How do adult visitors normally address their own learning motivations in the museum, and how
might mobile devices change the way visitors engage with and learn from exhibitions?
What does
learning and engagement
facilitated by a mobile device look like in a
museum
context?
How do adults naturalistically use mobile technologies in a museum context?Slide8Slide9
Why?
Smartphones as
the most ubiquitously used and connected mobile devices, outnumbering “basic” mobile phone
ownership in 2012 (Cochrane 2014
), in addition to the rising ubiquity of
personal mobile devices in
museums specifically—77
% at the NHM in 2013
Traditionally the focus of research on learning through personal mobile devices has been done at schools/formal education or school trips to informal learning settings (Chen et al. 2003, Evans 2008, Jones et al. 2013, Hedberg 2014)For
example Hwang & Tsai 2011 (out of 154 m- and u-learning studies sampled, only 6 focused on working adults whereas 123 studies focused on students in formal education)All despite the fact that adults are a large proportion of museum visitors, and research (Grenier 2010, Rennie & Williams 2006) has shown that they do learn in museums…Slide10
Research has shown that adults use informal learning opportunities from sources such as the media and public institutions to engage in life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning
(
Bell et
al, 2009; Rennie & Williams, 2006; Falk et al. 2012).
As
museums are one of these sources of informal learning, it is
important to understand how these increasingly ubiquitous mobile technologies might be affecting the ways in which adults
are engaging with learning opportunities in these settings.
Especially important for informal science learning for two reasons1) Changing landscape of scientific fields requires adults to understand new and relevant scientific issues (Miller, 2010)2) Adults (specifically parents and teachers) can be significant influencers on the career decisions and aspirations of the children around them, and so increasing scientific literacy and engagement with science amongst adults is valuable for that reason (Archer et al.
2012; Archer, Dewitt, Osborne, et al., 2013)Why?Slide11
Thank you!