The Department of Artifact Interaction - A Museum Education Learning Model

8/12/2019 The Department of Artifact Interaction - A Museum Education Learning Model

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Running Head: THE DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFACT INTERACTION 1

The Department of Artifact Interaction:

A Museum Education Learning Model

July 06, 2012


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THE DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFACT INTERACTION 2

Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 3

Introduction: Efforts to Save Museums from Societal Ambivalence ........................ 3

The Role of the Museum Education Department .............................................................. 5

Reimagining Museum Education Departments for the 21 st Century ........................ 9

Open Content: Shared Historical Authority .................................................................... 19

Can Museums Protect Authenticity and Broaden Authority? ................................... 21

Authority as Experience and Environment ...................................................................... 24

Authentic Artifact Interactions ............................................................................................. 28

Creating a Positive Reorganization Experience.............................................................. 30

Coexisting with District, State & Federal Education Guidelines .............................. 33

Assessing Museum, School & Student Outcomes ........................................................... 36

Conclusion: Its the Environment, Stupid ........................................................................ 37

Appendix ........................................................................................................................................ 40

Works Cited ......................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.


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Abstract

While museums are engaged in rethinking their philosophy and methodology in thewake of budget shortfalls and declining patronage, museum education departmentscontinue to operate according to a curricular-based, behaviorist pedagogy far from

the informal ideals on which museums were founded. A reimagined museumeducation department focused on open content and social learning would not onlymirror the actions and interests of 21 st Century users, but would better serve themuseums mission of informal learn ing and knowledge sharing. This paper explores alearning model for museum education departments designed around developingrelationships with organized education districts and schools. Through professionaldevelopment programs, users would catalog, orga nize and/or digitize the museumsundocumented collection, and be free to later utilize it in a myriad of media andmethods. The re-imagination of the museum education department is, by extension, are-imagination of the further use of professional development and its application inthe organized education classroom, and the paper explores the impact of such a

learning model on teaching faculty, students, school districts, and the museum-at-large.

Introduction: Efforts to Save Museums from Societal Ambivalence

The societal institution of the museum, a pillar in American culture for close

to 200 years, faces unprecedented challenges to its survival. As the production and

distribution of culture, media, information and content shifts from longstanding

producers to an ever-expanding world of producer-users (Benkler, 2006), museums

have struggled to keep their audience engaged. Couple that with cuts in federal

funding, the loss of image and artifact control in an age of digital representations,

and an erosion of general patrons and supportive members, and the relevancy of

museums seems under greater scrutiny than ever before.

Museums, as defined by the federal government in the 2010 Museums &

Library Services Act, are A public or private nonprofit agenc y or institution

organized on a permanent basis for essentially educational or aesthetic purposes,

which, utilizing a professional staff, owns or utilizes tangible objects, cares for them,

and exhibits them to the public on a regular basis ( S. 3984, 2010). This definition


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lacks applicable value considering field study of Americans who infrequently visit

museums, who often find museums and their collections repetitive and dull (George,

2002). For younger Americans, the museum not only fails to generate interest but

also lacks authority; Michael Edson, the Web & New Media Director of the

Smithsonian Institute, noted a recent informal survey of school-age children at a

Smithsonian museum showed that students had little or no prior knowledge of or

association with the Smithsonian as a museum, an authority, or even a brand

(personal communication, March 29, 2012).

Determined to return the museum not only to popular relevancy but to a

position of mission-based success, museum professionals and institutional boards

have created steering communities through accrediting organizations such as the

American Association of Museums and the New Media Consortium, dedicating

colloquia, conferences and white papers to produce and debate theories and

methods on how museums can stave off redundancy and instead re-captivate a

citizenry. The think tanks are ongoing, but general conclusions from initial

iterations find the museum has long been an inert space where patrons receive

information, but lack the opportunity to interact and engage with the information

(Simon, 2010). This one-sided discourse has never been ideal for patrons, but in a

time where humans have numerous opportunities to seek and engage content

through tangible interaction, virtual reality, or an augmented state, popular culture

has relegated the museum as a societal institution to a mausoleum, a place where

dead things are buried (Tirrell, 2000). These organizations propose systemic

changes at the institutional level, encouraging interaction and interchange between


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the subjects (audience) and the objects (artifacts). At the heart of these efforts to

boost the museum is a focus on community and technology: museums seek to use

their bricks and mortar locations as a hub for the engineering of community

outreach and cultural awareness, and to embrace new media and the digitization of

content and collections by creating augmented museum exhibits, such as the use of

QR codes in a bricks and mortar gallery (Hinojo, 2012).

Interaction has been a rallying cry for museums since technological advances

allowed for computing devices to be programmed and utilized for rotating gallery

exhibits (Conn, 2010), though interactive exhibits date back over 100 years (Feher,

1990), gaining consumer popularity with anthropologic events such as the Worlds

Fair (Rydell, 1987). In these exhibits, a patron will engage with a technological

device, following written directions to perform a task with the device. Upon

utilizing the device, the exhibit provides information either in the form of a result or

as static text (Heath et al, 2002). Advocates of these exhibits heralded the hands-on

opportunities in these environments (Allen, 2004), but critics look at the interaction

as rote and contrived, due to a lack of subject control in determining any aspect of

the interaction (Anderson, Lucas & Ginns, 2003). Others lament that only a handful

of the more than 17,000 museums in America have adopted a system of open

content, where information is ubiquitous and any interested party can interact with

the subject matter (Benkler, 2006; Lessig, 2008).

The Role of the Museum Education Department

Museum education departments are afforded greater interactive

opportunities with patrons than other departments within the museum due to their


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educative outreach mission with local schools and districts. Traditionally, museum

education departments focus their efforts on building curriculum materials to

compliment lessons and units in community schools, those classes culminating in

classroom visits where students tour the museum with a guide. Such actions are

highly regarded in museum and education spaces, where groups point to student

engagement and pinpoint the museum as a space of informal learning (Kratz &

Merritt, 2012; Paris, 1997; Kumpulanien & Lipponen, 2011). Museums also keep

data output records, allowing the ability to track a classrooms interaction with

artifacts from the curricular stage to the gallery visit, studying such information as

visits to the departments online materials to the foot traffic produced by the

education department. For this reason, museum education departments have in

large withstood the tempest of cutbacks and public resistance.

Much like the illusion of interactive exhibits, the success of museum

education departments is debatable. Organizations such as the American

Association of Museums and the Institute of Museum and Library Services celebrate

museums as spaces of informal learning (Falk, 2005; Kratz & Merritt, 2012).

Informal learning, as defined by Schugurensky (2000), is a learning phenomenon

that occurs outside the confines of traditional education, does not involve

curriculum, and celebrates the spontaneous tangents of the community of learners.

The positive outcomes of informal learning share a great deal in common with the

ideal classroom of education pioneer John Dewey (1938), whose ideal educational

system would be hands-on, interdisciplinary, and project-based. These theoretical

learning environments sounds nothing like the learning directed by museum


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education departments today, based in the same strategies as formal education and,

even in the exemplar offerings (Kratz & Merritt, 2012), lacks a semblance of

authentic informal learning.

Young people want to interact with meaningful content relevant to their lives

and situations, and want an opportunity to engage with that content in a personal,

authentic way (Shirky, 2010). These potential patrons want what Marshall

McLuhan (1963) would have called cool media, or content that requires active

participation and conscious deliberation due to its modal nature. Cool media is in

opposition to hot media, content that provides stimulus without conscious

involvement. Mimi Ito (2008) takes the concept a step further, her research of how

kids interact with digital content showing that kids want to engage in projects that

interest them, involve interaction with the content (and often their peers), and in

projects that are authentic rather than rote. The existing curricular focus in

museum education and artifact interaction is neither an example of cool media nor

interactive and authentic.

While museums fail to provide such opportunities to students, the vast

majority of educational institutions fail to as well. Existing educational policy

centers around the study of student outcomes gathered through the aggregation of

standardized examination data. Recent reauthorizations of the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act focus heavily on student achievement as defined by

standardized tests, with school districts and state legislatures linking the results not

only to student advancement but teacher retention, teacher pay grade, school

funding, and district oversight. The increase in didactic, behaviorist-based teaching


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methods coincides with a decrease in positive media attention for public schools,

which in turn have tailored more of their classroom efforts toward assessment-

based learning strategies (Emery & Ohanian, 2004).

Museums thus have an inherent advantage over schools in their ability to

offer unique and cutting-edge learning opportunities in an authentic informal

environment. Museums enjoy much less bureaucratic oversight in developing

projects and events than do elementary and secondary education institutions. Most

federal agencies and grant associations are more concerned that a museums

budgeted money affixes to the proper location rather than the content of the

museums exhibits. In cases where museum displays are provocative and result in

public outcry, museums by and large weather the negativity without incident.

Institutionally, museums have a history of developing content, exhibits and models

at odds with the dominant ideological trends of the time. As the dominant

ideological trend in education is data-driven via standardized assessment, the

museum would have a much easier time creating and implementing a learning

model at pace with cutting-edge educational theory while remaining incongruent to

formal educational policy.

Current learning opportunities in museum education may only be informal in

name, but the potential for informal learning, where students can view and

experience artifacts of historical or cultural significance, is inherent to the

institution. The lost of education funding that has resulted in a significant repeal of

museum field trips removes informal learning opportunities from the education

experience of many students, predominantly those in middle and lower-class


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neighborhoods (Blai r, 2008). Some of the nations larger museums, such as the Los

Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Diego Childrens Discovery Museum,

provide reduced admissions or shuttled service to the museums. These museums,

however, are predominantly urban and only provide this charity to proximal

schools. Moreover, small and moderate-sized museums lack the funding not only to

provide financial assistance to school districts in their community, but also to

provide virtual access to their museum through digitized collections on websites or

tablet applications. The funding gap between large museums and other museums

continues to widen; while only 5% of museums are considered by the American

Association of Museums as large, those museums receive more than half of all

federal funding (Arroyo, 2008). This is not a direct bias of the system, but rather

one of opportunity; larger museums have staff dedicated to grant writing and

benefactor development, while smaller museums lack such resources. Despite

efforts to make the grant-writing process more equitable for smaller museums

(Institute of Museum & Library Services, 2011), larger museums continue to benefit

most from grants and gifts (personal communication with Sandra Narva & Tim

Carrigan of the Institute of Museum & Library Services, March 30, 2012).

Reimagining Museum Education Departments for the 21 st Century

Museums must serve two ideologies in order to re-establish and strengthen

their relationship with organized education. First, museums must reimagine their

role and mission in society as that of content facilitator rather than gatekeeper.

Utilizing the museum education department as an arm of innovation and

organizational change would not only bolster existing theories of the potential


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emerging role of museums in society, but would also create new opportunities for

museum relevance in content creation and engaged membership. Second, museums

must organize their outreach around teacher professional development, specifically

in the field of History education. Choosing one subject for museum education

departments to focus their efforts on would appear to preemptively limit museum

staff in their educative mission, as the notion of museum celebrates interdisciplinary

study and life. However, focusing efforts on one specific school subject would

provide museum education staff with a controlled group to test, as well as providing

school administrators and districts a streamlined purpose to the nature of the

professional development.

Both ideologies would be accomplished by museums adopting a symbiotic

learning model with teachers at educational institutions, focused on interaction and

interchange between patrons and artifacts, a relationship that would provide

instruction and benefit to museums, faculty and students.

1) A museum education department would reimagine their role and mission,

both as an element of the museum as well as an educational outreach

institution. This re-imagination would center around two theoretical

planks: museum content should be provided along the lines of open

content/access/source initiatives, and patrons should have the

opportunity for multimodal interaction with the content.

Most modern museums are hardly different from museums of 20, 50, or even

200 years ago (Freedman, 2000): halls and galleries display artifacts around a

central theme, and patrons pass through the space, viewing the works and any


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content-based information provided by the museum. In this paradigm, the museum

controls most aspects of the patrons interaction, f rom the supplemental content

available to the color of the walls in the exhibit halls. While museums organize

collections in an effort to create a shared narrative for patrons to engage, the

engagement is passive. Patrons must obey rules to be silent, to not touch displays,

and to not take pictures of any of the works. In the case that a museum has digital

representations of their artifacts, the selection is often limited, and usually only

usable within the museums Intranet. The patrons interaction wi th the museum

authority is thus adversarial rather than communicative.

A reimagined museum education department would remove any and all

vestiges of document authority from its institutional memory. Education

departments would instead focus on delivering museum content by providing all

aspects of an artifact to its patron base: biographical information, provenance,

historical importance, resistance and alternative readings, and the digital image of

the artifact. This is not to say that the museum would abandon its position as a

place of expertise and knowledge about its artifacts; rather, the museum would

remove the block separating it from its patrons, encouraging open communication

as a way to understand the artifacts effect on viewers, not just provid ing the

dominant reading of the work. Museum education departments would encourage

patrons to tinker with artifacts, search out how the artifact affects their world and

their personal life, and assist patrons in utilizing the artifact in remixing,

repackaging, reprogramming, and other potential artifact uses.


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2) The department would move its resources away from creating

curriculum and leading tours, focusing instead on an interdisciplinary

learning project for organized educational institutions, specifically K-12

schools and classrooms. The project would directly affect museum

information technology services, school districts, school faculty, and

students. The concrete goal of the project would be to classify, archive

and digitize existing museum artifacts and create a greater museum

digital footprint.

Current museum outreach endeavors predominantly involve curriculum

creation. Various museum staff take responsibility for researching the works in the

museums collection, as well as artifacts visiting the spac e as part of revolving

exhibit, and produce various iterations of content for multiple ages. This content is

provided to teachers, either through a lecture-based professional development

session, or via web download. Teachers utilize the curriculum with their students,

typically not engaged with museum education staff. The staff and teacher re-engage

to culminate the curricular experience with a guided tour of the museum. In this

example, content exploration and interaction is limited to the curriculum producer,

and the only aspect of informal learning would be the museum tour, which given its

guided nature would not be informal by definition and likely by practice.

In the reimagined museum education department, staff would not spend

their time creating a one-size-fits-all curriculum for an artist or exhibit. The

education staffs primary focus would be on the museums collection of

undocumented, unclassified and/or undigitized artifacts. A large portion of a


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museums collection is not on display at t he bricks and mortar museum; curators

rotate out artifacts based on a series of variables, and many museums have storage

areas full of unclassified or undocumented artifacts. Small and moderate-sized

museums lack the ability to document and digitize their collections, and large

museums lack the ability to classify and archive their expansive collections.

Through the educational outreach program, this work would be shared among a

collection of community teachers and students in a model known in museum circles

as folksonomy and in business parlance as crowdsourcing. These efforts would not

only provide museums with an expanding database of their artifacts, but would

provide schools with project-based, real-world experience in research,

investigation, organization, and digital archiving.

3) The digitization project would require museum education staff to utilize

social learning and constructivist teaching methods, understanding their

role as facilitator rather than lecturer. Staff would need to coordinate the

concrete project between the museum IT department and various school

district IT departments, utilize evolving methods of leadership and

organizational change within the museum and each unique school

district, and engage in building environments for community-based

learning allowing exploration, innovation and tinkering to flourish.

Traditional methods of providing content from an expert to a novice

incorporate aspects of the lecture, where an individual with knowledge on a topic

shares such information, often through oral recitation and written handouts.

Students are expected to retain this information; their recall tested through various


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means such as oral response, short answer essay, or standardized assessment. In

current museum practices, the education staffer shares their expert knowledge of an

artist or exhibit through written curriculum or a tour-based oral lecture. Expert-

novice interaction is limited to a sender-receiver relationship except in the case of

qu estions during a tour; however, tours are designed to embody the museums

narrative on the exhibit or artist, and answers to those questions work to return

conversation to the predetermined content.

Teaching, however, is more than the delivery of content. In the reimagined

museum education department, staff members would remain content specialists, it

being only one of many portions of their repertoire, which would include but not be

limited to the following: assisting students in finding information through deductive

reasoning and inference, coordinating diverse groups of individuals to coalesce

around the concrete goal of artifact digitization, providing leadership and support to

learners of varying interest and ability, and engaging in unforeseen learning

experiences. These human management skills are as important as content

knowledge, but they allow the education staff to be a content steward, a person for

whom content is free, ubiquitous, and should be enjoyed by all, rather than a

content gatekeeper, a person who determines the learning course of action and does

not veer despite educative opportunities.

4) Museum staff would work with schools to provide professional

development training to classroom teachers, building community with

the teaching faculty around the concrete need of digitized artifacts and

the abstract desire of inspired students. The professional development


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would be longitudinal, with the museum educational staff devoted to

continuing education and faculty support over a period of weeks, months

or semesters.

Museum staff would model the classification, organization and

digitization of artifacts for teachers. Staff would follow up and provide

authentic, undocumented/undigitized artifacts for teachers to organize,

archive and digitize, creating a practice space and fulfilling a concrete

need. Staff would scaffold the experiences for the teachers, working with

the needs of each teacher to provide primary sources and contextual

clues so that the teachers would not only be able to classify artifacts but

understand their importance, as well as understand conservation and

preservation issues and requirements.

The existing goal of museum education departments is rolled into outcomes

produced through museum/student interaction. There is no content interaction

between museum staff and classroom teachers, design or otherwise. Classroom

teachers, whose content mastery likely exists in another field, recite the curriculum

to students within the organized education environment, and in ideal current

practices would assist the museum tour guide by reminding students of previous

questions and attempt to tie museum information to other curricular events.

Realistically, museum staff assume the reins on the group once at the museum,

relegating the teacher to behavior control or passive observer.

The decrease in organized education field trip funding has changed the

museum/education relationship, and the situation should be viewed as an


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opportunity for more engagement between two distinct yet common professionals:

the museum educator and the classroom educator. A professional development

system designed by museum education departments for the benefit of organized

education teachers would provide teaching faculty with professional development

hours from a respected institution holding content-specific accreditation. By

dedicating the bulk of their outreach to constructivist professional development,

museum educators and teachers would engage and learn through social interaction,

modeling, goal building and reflection. Teachers would learn not through didactic

lecture but through project-based interaction, the same style they will teach their

students.

5) After an initial series of professional development sessions, teachers

would take the concepts to their classroom, utilizing the exact same

methods in their classes as were utilized in professional development:

modeling the process of identifying, organizing and digitizing artifacts;

scaffolding the process for students, and encouraging students to later

utilize the digital image for curated collections, remixes, programming, or

other manners that show the students understanding of the artifact and

its place in history.

Existing teacher professional development practices struggle to provide

affordance and agency to teachers while supplying information on new

methodologies and technologies. Most professional development initiatives begin

and end with the lecture session, giving teachers no space to experiment with the

information and determine how it can apply to their everyday experience (Slepkov,


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2008). Without practical and applicable utility, professional development provides

little return on investment for administrators, teachers and students. Teachers,

faced with a growing political focus on student test assessment, lack the motivation

and freedom to apply unique methods to lesson implementation, rendering new

education trends redundant (Sarason, 1999). If teachers are unable to put

professional development into their instruction, the effect and purpose of the

practice is severely limited.

The re-imagination of the museum education department is, by extension, a

re-imagination of the further use of professional development and its application in

the organized education classroom. Through the museu ms professional

development initiative, teachers are active members of the learning environment,

expected to wear the numerous hats required of museum education staff. Teachers,

however, have professional training and experience working with school-age

children to develop research strategies, work through emerging and unforeseen

problems, push through stressors and capitalize on successes. Teachers would be

allowed to fully utilize those skills in this social learning environment, an

environment dedicated to applied learning that meets and exceeds the standards

and requirements of school administrators and districts.

6) Students would provide the artifacts and digital images to the museum

for use in various incarnations. Students would be encouraged to share

their remixes, collections, and various uses of the artifact with the

museum, which would present these various media over their Internet

platform. Because the project is open access/content/source, students


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would provide the work to the museum free and clear, and students

would also have the opportunity to continue working with museum

artifacts after the school unit was completed.

Teachers, administrators and educational therapists agree that the display of

student work is an important part of the growth and maturation of a student

(Kerman, Kimball & Martin, 1980 ). The application of a students output in a real -

world scenario provides the student with an added value in and ownership of their

work. At present, this output is viewable only by the school community. There are

numerous media outlets available to share personal work, such as YouTube and

Prezi, but a growing number of schools are restricting the sharing of files and

projects over these servers. Moreover, the majority of projects created in organized

educational environments lack utility outside of school walls; a project for a course

in an American Literature class is designed primarily to garner a grade in the class,

and that design often renders the project incapable of greater use.

Projects for the re-imagined museum education department are not designed

for standardized assessment and data accrual, but rather to produce the tangible

outcome of an organized and digitized artifact. These projects exist due to

applicable utility, and inherent in the project is the potential for large-scale audience

interaction. The classification and organization of the artifacts will be utilized by the

museum in its database, and the digital images of the artifacts displayed on the

various museum Internet platforms. When students produce a remix, recreation,

programming or other manipulation of artifacts, the museum education department

will work with the student and family to gain all permissions for presentation. Fears


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of trolling, spamming, bullying or other negativity considered an outcome of social

media would be mitigated due to the collection existing only at the museum

Internet, a controlled and moderated space.

Open Content: Shared Historical Authority

The first and most important step for museum education departments in the

adoption of this learning model is to shift existing institutional practices and biases

away from a content benefactor model to an open content one. Open content, as

defined by the New Media Consortium, is an educatio nal theory designed to take

advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective

knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of

it (Johnson, Levine, Smith & Stone, 2010). Knowledge-based institutions such as

schools and museums could shatter the passive paradigm of subject-content

interaction by opening their information archives to anyone in search of the content,

according to open content advocates Yochai Benkler (2006) and Lawrence Lessig

(2008). In an open-content environment, users activate their content interaction

through a process of search, evaluation and use of specific content; the existence of

content free of restriction is only one plank in the open content theory. Advocates of

open content herald the ability for immediate use of resources to provide creativity

and innovation in content generation and utilization; in Clay Shirkys (2010)

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age , the growth and

large-scale adoption of the World Wide Web is in large part associated with the

development and implementation of Apache HTTP Server, a software developed by

a disparate group of computer scientists and interested parties who provided free


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and ubiquitous access to their work and coding. By working on the protocol

software in a transparent fashion, anyone with an interest in the project could

follow along in the development and tinker on their own, allowing a greater pool of

technicians and scientists to provide unique viewpoints to the program.

Open content as a theoretical model for the sharing of information is practical

due to recent rapid technological improvements leading to an opportune price point

for individuals to engage with limitless information. In The Wealth of Networks

(2006), Benkler argues that projects like Apache HTTP Server, Wikipedia, or

SETI@home exist and have thrived only because the cost to produce no longer

exceeds the opportunity threshold, allowing a commons of global possibility to

engage a topic and, through their collective knowledge, create a product of greater

value and authenticity than the traditional purveyors of media. For Benkler, success

is in the utilization and evolution of open source/content/access initiatives: over

half of all web servers utilize Apache code; Wikipedia has challenged and/or

supplanted reputable encyclopedias such as World Book and Encyclopedia

Britannica, and over 3,000,000 people currently use their personal cognitive surplus

and their computers RAM surplus to assist Berkeley scientists with the SETI

initiative. In education, the recent proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses,

known colloquially as MOOCs, are a viable arm of course production for higher

education because of the numerous low-cost options for personal computing, falling

price of institutional bandwidth, ease of textual and video content streaming,

proliferation of social media outlets, and cultural familiarity with online learning

management systems. MOOCs exist in a time where the economic, social and


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cultural price of engagement has fallen substantially, allowing such an initiative to

gain traction with high volume and relatively low overhead.

The prototype for MOOCs originated in 2008 as a selection of University-level

courses based around a broad subject such as Human-Computer Interaction

(CCK08 - The Distributed Course , 2012). Content was disseminated in real-time

through a mixture of forum discussion, student contribution, social media, and

instructor guidance. As the professor collects and aggregates student response and

interest, the shape of the MOOC changes, and learning opportunities evolve due to

current events, student interests, and the artifacts created by course students via

blogs, discussion boards, social media, etc. The instructor works to facilitate the

emerging themes of the course with seminal authors and texts in the field, applying

both to current events and dominant course ideologies, questioning and

deliberating through the experience. The end result is an education experience built

as much from the wisdom of the crowd as from the course instructor, whose

authority now comes not from content mastery but from content application.

Can Museums Protect Authenticity and Broaden Authority?

The loss of content mastery is a heightened fear in museums, exacerbated by

the relationship between authority and authenticity. Museums, historically a

reputable location adorned with authentic artifacts, have felt the threat of artifact

forgery since before museums were institutionalized, when churches, governments

and private collectors held such items. The value of an artifact depended solely on

its authenticity, and the link between artifacts and culture created a paradox: if the


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artifact is not authentic, what becomes of that culture? As profiteers worked during

the Renaissance to create facsimiles of sculpture and painting, artifact stewards

cherished provenance and authenticity, and protected it at great length. As the

original stewards gave way to the museum institutions of today, the fear of forgery

was coupled with technologically enhanced reproduction. This fear is echoed in

Walter Benjamins (1936) essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction , one of the first critical looks at the intersection of artifacts and

technology. Benjamin states that not only does the modern printing press allow for

near seamless reproduction of artifacts, but the ease and speed of reproduction

would devalue art and render the question of authenticity moot. This postulate,

what Benjamin called the aura of art, has been soundly defeated by cultural

theorists and art critics alike; one need only look at the works of Van Gogh to see the

exponential increase in value in his authentic work congruent with the rise in

reproductions (Davis, 2008).

Despite evidence to the contrary, museums continue to fear the loss of

artifact authority, those fears inadvertently stoked by the offerings of visual and

cultural theorists. Marshall McLuhan (1962) saw an emerging global village 30

years before the World Wide Web, and predicted its rise would match the fall of

visual culture; John Berger (1972) declared a full separation of the work of art from

its image due to televised reproduction during the 1960s and 1970s, and Lessig

(2008) questioned the importance and value of the actual artifact in a digital society.

While none of these critics set out to heighten anxiety, their words resonated with

innovators and theorists in a progressive fashion while solidifying the fears of


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established views, a predicament McLuhan referred to as a want to live in the safety

of the known rather than on the wave of the unknown (1964). Museums, bound up

in protecting authority throughout their history of preserving artifacts, continue to

associate their role as protectors despite their interest as purveyors.

Museums also ignore the central points of theorists like Benjamin, McLuhan,

Berger and Lessig, none of whom argue that artifacts are unimportant. Quite the

contrary, all three agree with the importance of artifacts, but understand that

society has evolved past isolated information into a Web of contextual content.

Their thought, in accordance with the beliefs of open content, is that the meanings of

an artifact are interdependent to the artifact itself, an approach to artifact

interaction known as reception theory. In reception theory, the intention of the

artifact is only one possible reading and interpretation of the artifacts meaning.

The authors intention is only one element of an artifacts dominan t or hegemonic

level, the interpretation shaped by the dominant popular culture of the time (Hall,

1973). For artifacts in museums, it is the hegemonic level of the artifact that most

often results in its categorization. However, there are other readings of artifacts

that are determined by the audience member interacting with the artifact: the

negotiated level, where the individual accepts many aspects of the author or

dominant popular interpretation, but challenges those assumptions in certain

situations; and the counter-hegemonic, where the individual understands but

rejects the author or dominant popular interpretation, bringing an oppositional

framework to interpret the icon and thus creating meaning along a separate strata.


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Authority as Experience and Environment

Negotiated and counter-hegemonic readings are proof of the relativity of

content and the importance of context and shared understanding. Individuals

interpret content based on their existing knowledge, current environment and prior

experiences. The result of that synthesis is the individual experience. The

interaction of individual experiences is shared experience, and common shared

experience results in the creation of community, culture and environment. This

focus on community and environment is central to the learning theories utilized in

this practical museum model, stemming most notably from the work of Russian

psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978). For Vygotsky, environment is the foundation of

learning; a childs development is interdep endent to his environment. Therefore,

tools ranging from a chair to a language system are social constructions, and

children utilize these tools to interact with their environment. The transition from

external tool use to internalization marks the graduation to higher-level thinking;

however, any and all levels of thinking remain socially constructed. Didactic content

dispersal negates the contextualization of content as well as the contents

interaction with individual and group environments.

Vygotsky s theories are evident in the more practical work of Albert Bandura

(1977), whose research into the methods in which people learn best resulted in the

development of Social Learning Theory. Social Learning Theory puts great

emphasis on the interaction of community members in any environment, where

members of different skills and vocations gain cues from one another in how to

behave and produce action. Individuals with less knowledge in a given area pay


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greater attention to those with more knowledge, rigorously noting their efforts so as

to model them for later success. Such a model requires focus, an attention to detail,

and motivation from the viewer, but such variables are rarely questioned in social

learning theory environments due to the inherent motivating effects of authentic

community.

In the reimagined museum, the museum educator would emerge as an expert

or respected member of the community, whether the community be a group of

teachers in professional development or a group of students in the classroom.

Learning would not be administered in a top-down fashion from expert to novices,

but rather in an experiential setting, where all members worked on the project, and

the expert would not only model proper protocol for project elements, but also

assist novices through various means and mechanisms which Bandura referred to

as scaffolding. In the digital archive project, an expert could scaffold an artifact for a

novice by suggesting Internet search terms for research, spurring debate on the

artifacts origin through response -directed questions, or point to the methods of

other individuals and groups in determining artifact origin. Novices would work

with numerous artifacts in the unit, gaining comfort in the process of classification,

organization and digitization as they gained experience. This process is what

Vygotsky (1978) called the Zone of Proximal Development, a learning space

between requiring assistance to complete a task and self-sufficiency on task

completion. In the museum digitization project, self-sufficiency would not mean a

student could identify, classify and digitize any artifact, but rather have the tools to

interact with the artifact in an authentic and meaningful way.


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One of the central tenants in Social Learning Theory is the role of the expert

as facilitator. Novices look to the expert for information, and it would be nave to

expect that the only information shared is curriculum designed and sponsored by

the institution. The expert must therefore strive to create an open and positive

environment, understanding that all students bring their own individual

environments to the shared community, and that the shared community is a unique

environment of the moment. It would also be nave to believe that the expert-novice

relationship is a one-way transmitter-receiver relationship. Educators who can shift

their paradigm from gatekeeper to facilitator, whether museum or school-based,

will have greater agency to assist students in their learning endeavors. By opening

up the notion of educator to a person who doesnt have to be in front of the room to

lead the room, the expert will be able to see how various approaches to content

facilitation and assistance affect various students, experiencing their own growth in

a zone of proximal development.

Novices and experts could be members of multiple communities, and their

role in one community could be as expert, in another a novice. Such fluctuation

based on the needs and goals of the community is one of the markings of a

Community of Practice, where a group of like-minded individuals coalesce around a

domain, or a specific area of interest (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The members of this

community have a practical interest in the topical area. The interest in the topic and

a gathering of information on the topic does not make a community; this

information must be utilized in some fashion, and must be shared with others.

Rules of the community are generated by the community and shaped by the specific


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needs of the content area and the practical use of the information. The community

runs through the sharing of information and motivation, the encouragement of new

members, and engagement in problem solving. Central to a Community of Practice

is the relationship between community members as transmitter-receiver and

receiver-transmitter at the same time. To apply the model of a Community of

Practice to the earlier discussion of Massive Open Online Courses, a MOOC by

definition is not necessarily a Community of Practice; despite having thousands of

individuals utilizing the Internet to engage around a singular topic, the learning

endeavor is solitary if there is no social interaction or authentic sharing of content

and tangential information. However, a MOOC that grows over the course of the

semester, spurred by community discussions and insight and geared around

problem solving and field application, would be an authentic Community of Practice.

The growth of museum education departments from cloistered mausoleums

to thriving enterprises of open content and social learning theory would be well

spurred by the fostering of Communities of Practice. Numerous communities would

be at play within the reimagined space: each individual school classroom working

on a digitization project for the museum, the various teacher professional

development communities working to understand and provide assistance to their

students, and the museum education department as a whole would exist to gather,

share and apply information to a series of community-defined goals. The success of

these communities will depend on the museums ability to embr ace open content

and encourage the shaping of culture and environment to happen without direct

control over the artifact.


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Authentic Artifact Interactions

If the museums mission is to remain a relevant place for education and

informal learning, the museum must reach out to people as part of a community, a

community created by making individuals part of the museum experience. Open

access, social learning theory and communities of practice are three methods in

which the reimagined museum would seek to increase awareness, knowledge,

agency and interest in the museum, with those abstract goals buffered by the

concrete creation of digital artifacts and eventual remixes. There can be no

community and no common goal if the organization is designed as a God of

knowledge rather than a servant to it. Prior implementations of technology-

enhanced museum outreach did not shift the organizational paradigm, keeping the

museum as the purveyor of content and authority, with the patron a passive agent.

The technological aspect of the museum was the automated exhibit, most often a

computer-driven accessory to the artifact or theme of the gallery. Automated

exhibits allow patrons to interact with the museum through hands-on experience:

this could be following prompts on a computer terminal, pressing buttons or pulling

levers to engage a science experiment, or even using mobile technology to scan a QR

code to access further information on a topic. These actions are hands-on, but the

relationship between the museum and patron remains transmitter-receiver.

Technology that continues to serve the existing paradigm of the museum cannot

help the museum reinvent its place in society.

Museum education staff must understand the innumerate alternative

readings and reactions to artifacts prior to engaging school districts and teachers


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with the professional development outreach. The spirit of narrative inquiry and

reception theory must exist within the technological advances of the community, or

the advances are window dressing. Allowing teachers and students to play a

practical role in the development of the museum through artifact classification,

organization and digitization is practical application of technology as a constructive

and social medium for education and outreach, meeting the goal of informal

learning for museums while serving organized education with unique alternative

History education methods. The increase in museum interest and content

consumption is linked to the final stage of the learning model: the personal

curation, exhibition, remixing, repackaging, and use of digitized artifacts in

productive manners.

Most educational computing looks at the computer as a tool that changes the

delivery of existing content, not the experience of the content (Ostashewski, Reid &

Moisey, 2009). This reality is a far cry from the vision of Seymour Papert, who saw

the intersection of children and computing as a device to spur educational agency

among a traditionally ambivalent audience: the powerful contribution of the new

technologies in the enhancement of learning is the creation of personal media

capable of supporting a wide range of intellectual styles (Papert, 1991). Papert

created Logo, software that combined mathematical equations with a visual

interface, as an example of media creation and applied learning. Unlike most

educational software, Logo did not repackage math fact assessment, but rather

required its users to apply math facts in order to create art with the programs

cursor, called a turtle. Similar personal media software exists in use today, such as


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the MIT Media Labs Scratch and Carnegie Mellons Alice, but both focus their efforts

on STEM-based subjects, and only recently have picked up slight traction in

organized education. A focus on personal media creation, through the utility of a

museum and with the result of website publication, would provide a technological

boost to history and humanities education, with a concrete result showing the

learning journey of the creator. Through platforms and applications including but

not limited non-linear digital editing, graphics editing platforms, web development,

and sandbox games such as Minecraft, students would fully immerse themselves in

the content of the unit, creating their own artifacts in a reaction to the artifacts from

the museum space. The exploration of content is natural for teenagers (Ito, 2008),

and similar projects involving open content and social media have produced

remarkable results, whether it be web design, bringing a cause to light, or even

helping feed homeless people (Shirky, 2010).

Creating a Positive Reorganization Experience

Transitioning the museum, its staff and its institutional memory from an

organization of controlled content to a community of open content is a daunting

endeavor. Museums are traditionally inert organizations (personal communication

with Nina Simon, November 02, 2011), and initiatives to overhaul existing practices

for seemingly radical and destructive ones could be overwhelming to the institution.

Museum administrators must tread carefully with changes; as the change focuses on

the method of outreach rather than the mission of the institution, leadership will be

charged with reframing the museum both for staff as well as patrons (Bolman &

Deal, 2003). Museums are, at their heart, educational institutions. The longstanding


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goal of museums is not only to determine, display and preserve artifacts of cultural

and historical significance, but also to present them and the information

surrounding them through informal means and methods. The father of modern

museums in America, James Smithson, provided the foundation for what became the

Smithsonian Institute in order for the general public to ha ve a place for the increase

and diffusion of knowledge ( Ewing, 2007). This mission is as much a part of the

reimagined museum as it is a part of the present museum. Framing the change as a

method to better serve individuals through greater outreach and sharing of content

will excite some and frighten others; leadership must establish the frame and hold

true to it, and work with staff to ease the transition, understanding that trepidation

of those uncertain of the new focus, and appreciating the role of all existing museum

staff. Everett Rogers (2003) notes in his theory on the diffusion of innovation, the

path of accepting a project or model happens along a bell curve, with 2/3 of people

engaging and accepting the model at the time when the idea has fully broken into

the popular culture of the discipline. While leadership might want the entire staff to

jump head- first into the new model, Rogers theory shows that only a sixth of staff

will truly accept the idea at first; however, it is the work of those people that helps

make the idea palatable, and later engaging for the rest of the team.

Rogers diffusion of innovation is an apt model for the expected acceptance of

this model in formal educational institutions. At the heart of this model is a belief

that access to museums should be available to all students, and American museums

should have the ability to work with schools and districts both to provide the

content and knowledge of the museum, but also to digitize their collection.


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However, current educational practice encourages standardized measurement,

behaviorist learning, and STEM subjects. Schools struggling with budgetary

measures are unlikely to adopt a learning model focusing on concrete measurement,

constructivist learning, and subjects predominantly in the humanities and social

sciences. Instead, the innovative schools adopting this model will likely be affluent

institutions that have not seen a decline in humanities courses, field trips, or

classroom funding. According to Rogers, however, this is a natural process for

innovative ideas. Early adopters of projects and partnerships are wealthier and

better educated than the general population. The initiative will spread to the

general population if it has relative advantage, is compatible, easily observable, easy

to implement and isn't too complex.

Museums must remain cognizant of the ethical issues in the initial

development of the reimagined museum education department. The reimagined

museum education departments design takes great ste ps to provide museum access

to school districts through the use of technology and open content. While Rogers

makes a pragmatic argument to accept initial trials of the learning model in

environments of affluence and means, such a trial is, from the ethical perspective of

access, counter to the purpose of the learning model. Ethical decisions should not

be justified on a singular perspective (Hosmer, 2010); therefore, museums should

engage local schools and districts in the projects merits and applicable connections

to existing educational policy and public perception therein. Finding a school

and/or district that lacks the financial means to engage in traditional museum

programs but has an engaged faculty and supportive administration would meet the


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ideal mission of the program, regardless of whether or not the technological abilities

were cutting-edge nor the importance of standardized tests in meeting state and

federal guidelines

Coexisting with District, State & Federal Education Guidelines

A working relationship between museums and educational spaces includes

the elements to gain traction with museums and school districts alike; it makes

sense on an ideological level, as both institutions are designed to promote learning,

and it limits financial risk on both sides of the partnership. However, the informal

learning mission of museums stands in stark contrast to current federal and state

educational policy, as well as private trends in educational pedagogy. Recent

reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act focus heavily on

student achievement as defined by standardized tests, to the point that school

districts and state legislatures have redefined teacher retention and pay to student

achievement as defined by standardized tests, as well as many charter schools that

herald success in student achievement defining said achievement by standardized

tests. This path has the support of textbook publishers, state and federal education

departments, and is one of the rare instances of bipartisan support in the 112 th

Congress. In all likelihood, the near future of public education in America will be

dominated by an allegiance to the aggregation and collation of data collected

through standardized assessment (Hannaway & Mittleman, 2011).

While educational policy currently does not support informal or

constructivist learning methods, trends in federal policy support the combined

efforts of government organizations and free enterprise, known colloquially as


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public-private partnerships. In a public-private partnership, a governmental

organization contracts with a private sector company to produce or provide a

government-based service. Historically, partnerships in America have focused on

tangible infrastructure, but the growth of charter schools over the last 15 years, as

well as the influx of teachers trained through Teach for America, can be attributed to

educational public-private partnerships. Both the Republican and Democratic

committees for the House of Representatives Education Committee have noted

public-private partnerships as areas of importance in their versions of the 2013

Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization (personal communication

with staffers Michelle Varnhagen and Daniel Brown of the House Education &

Workforce committee March 27, 2012), as well as places for government to

encourage growth. A public-private partnership between museums and educational

institutions would be germane to such policy matters. Schools and districts would

be working with institutions accredited by national and/or international bodies,

providing recognition and authenticity for the projects. Teachers would also benefit

from the partnership, with noteworthy and accredited organizations providing the

professional development and subsequent awards and certificates, increasing

tangible experience and resume content.

With disparate objectives for the various stakeholders in the partnership,

each community of practice will need to determine its own goals in a manner that

gives voice to all involved and understands the necessary terminology as well as the

fears of the group. The model of team-building and organizational change that best

sets objectives, details a step-by-step plan of action, and provides members with


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voice in the organization, is David Cooperriders Appreciative Inquiry (1987).

Appreciative Inquiry is an organizational design approach that focuses solely on

positive elements, setting goals and building ideas rather than determining

problems and relegating troubleshooting. The team works together to share ideas

and set goals, and from that experience develops what Cooperrider calls a positive

core, a host of traits and knowledge centers held by team members and often

underappreciated in a workplace. This positive core becomes the foundation for the

mission and journey of the team.

Developing a positive core in the early stages of the reimagined museum

(whether in a community of museum staff engaged in reshaping the museum, a

professional development group, or a classroom of students) is vital to a learning

model focused on reframing the subject. The reimagined museum works best when

its members hold knowledge and expertise in a variety of settings. The process of

organizing, digitizing and curating a museum could involve any academic discipline:

within one project students could engage with math, computer science, architecture,

history, music and poetry. The positive core at the heart of Appreciative Inquiry

provides teachers a connection to various knowledge centers within their

communities: in the professional development community, one teacher might have

a background in web development, and in the classroom community, a student

could be a master at non-linear editing and video footage enhancement. There is

also an intrinsic worth in the project; a teacher with no interest in museum artifacts

may start the project with extrinsic motivations for professional development, but

by sharing personal knowledge centers with the team through the positive core, the


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teacher would see the numerous and divergent strengths shared by the team, and

likely see how her strengths and knowledge centers could enhance the community.

Assessing Museum, School & Student Outcomes

Creating a system to determine the successes and difficulties of the

reimagined museum is vital to the continuation of the learning model. Museums,

like many cultural institutions, have a contentious relationship with assessment

practices; while museums value aggregate data and the opportunity to utilize it to

improve practices (Cornell, 2011), there is a longstanding institutional fear of

relying too heavily on quantitative data that is more user-friendly in both

compilation and computation but isolates the museum experience to abstracted

variables (Goulding, 2000). Museums have often relied on case studies as a means

of research and assessment, but critics look at case study offerings as celebratory

rather than critical (Dubois & Araujo, 2007).

The reimagined museum proves to be a tricky model to assess for these

divergent reasons. For the museum, the concrete objective of this project is the

creation of a digital footprint for various artifacts: a classification, organization and

digital image, among other things. However, this project is borne of an abstract goal

of increased exposure to, engagement with and enthusiasm for the museum. This

goal could produce false positive or negative results: if student groups complete the

task to specifics in a rote fashion, the concrete objective may be met but the

intended outcome would not be positive; likewise, if a group struggled with the

technological requirements for the project but became engaged with the subject


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matter and showed their mastery in other aspects, the concrete aspect would be a

fail but the overall mission of the department would have been a success.

Design research provides an assessment methodology that grounds the

project in a concrete objective but also incorporates the voice of all stakeholders in

the assessment process, a process that begins with the first organizational meeting

in the museum education department and continues through all other communities:

teacher professional development, classroom launch, peer-to-peer interaction and

even patrons who utilize the created artifacts through the museums Internet.

Through this methodology, the museum can focus its assessment guise on the

creation of digital artifacts, but has a wealth of information on the progress and

pitfalls occurring along the way in the learning environments. In viewing the results

of a school, the museum can incorporate the success of digitization with the field

notes on teacher practices, student engagement, technical difficulties, need of

scaffolding, and other variables, and utilize that information to better shape and

scaffold the next iteration at the next school. Design research advocates note their

research is environmentally-based and the results of one project hold primary

significance in that one project and not as an abstracted theory; however, design

research expects researchers to tinker with systems and situations based on past

experience in the efforts to continuously improve the model.

Conclusion: Its the Environment, Stupid

One of the popular cultural points of technological innovation discussion is

the development of globalization. Thomas Friedman provided a colloquial account

of the struggles of wanting prosperity versus holding on to culture in his book The


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Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman, 1999). In this book, Friedman explores both the

benefits and costs of a world in which commerce and culture can happen half a

world away at the same time. Whether people wish to drive toward a more

hegemonic idea of prosperity or keep their cultural institutions and habits is not

Friedmans primary concern; rather, Friedman notes the importance of seeing the

world as its own environment, regardless of ideology.

In each of the learning theories and methodologies utilized to reimagine the

museum education department, emphasis was placed on environment as a context

of education. A number of innovative museums have already taken to embracing

culture, community and environment in their efforts to change (Simon, 2010),

making their spaces community centers masquerading as museums, where

individuals are encouraged to share their thoughts and opinions as part of the

exhibitions. While the efforts are still in their infancy and the communication still

one-way, these initiatives support the importance of accounting for environment in

creating a more representative museum space.

This project proposes a first step into expanding these museum

environments into the digital realm, free and ubiquitous to the global community.

The real interactions of staff and teachers and the concrete creations of students will

be shaped by the past knowledge and experience of all stakeholders and their

environments, and in working with the artifacts a new community and experience

will be created alongside the digital artifact. But the community does not end there.

Once the artifact exists in the museum Internet, to be utilized across various

platforms in various ways, the community around the artifact will change and so


39/43


will its interpretation. This could be another place of anxiety for museums and their

institutional inertia toward letting go of authority. Local community and global

community do not have to be mutually exclusive, however. The museum must

remember that its job is as a steward to and facilitator of artifacts and meanings,

and that informal learning opportunities are not just available during the museums

normal business hours, but at every moment of the day online. How such an

informal learning missive enters into the public conscious is up to the museum,

spearheaded by its education department.


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Appendix

Cadre 16 Courses

Fall 2010 EDLT 725 New Media Literacy P. Sparks, Ph.D.

EDLT 750 Introduction to Research K. Davis, Ed.D.EDLT 770A Cognition and Technology L. Polin, Ph.D.

Spring 2011 EDLT 770B Social Learning Theory L. Polin, Ph.D.EDLT 751 Quantitative Research Methods K. Davis, Ed.D.EDLT 762 Innovations and Change M. Goodale, Ed.D.

Summer 2011 EDLT 760 Global Perspectives on LearningTechnology

G. Stager, Ph.D.

EDLT 734 Descriptive Statistics F. Madjidi, Ed.D.

Fall 2011 EDLT 700 Leadership Theories and Practice F Madjidi, Ed.D.EDLT 727 Knowledge Creation and

CollaborationL. Polin, Ph.D.

EDLT 735 Inferential Statistics F. Madjidi, Ed.D.

Spring 2012 EDLT 752 Qualitative Methods and Analysis L. Polin, Ph.D.EDLT 721 Policy Development P. Sparks, Ph.D.EDLT 724 Ethics and Society K. Rhodes, Ed.D.

Summer 2012 EDLT 780 Imagining Futures L. Polin, Ph.D.EDLT 726 Emerging Technologies J. McManus, Ph.D.


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At a time when small and moderate-sized museums struggle with decliningpatronage, propulsion in both the open access movement and open educational

resources provide an opportunity for museums to bring in new visitors as well asoffer existing patrons greater insight and communication through dynamic contenton the Web. The museum, an archetype of informal and non-formal education, hassteadfastly protected its artifacts and intellectual property since the dawn ofindustrial printing, missing numerous opportunities to engage an ample publicbecause of a fear of lost revenue and authority. Such fears have been provenunfounded by classic and contemporary research, and a select number of museumsare engaging the open access movement to provide patrons with the richness ofdigital museums and their affordances. These projects, such as GLAMWiki andMuseum.Steve, utilize . A logical step in the progression of museums and openaccess is the creation of museum-based MOOCs, short courses provided by themuseum that highlight traveling exhibitions or constant collections. By workingwith its own education department and the various expert

The Department of Artifact Interaction - A Museum Education Learning Model

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