Session Information
16 SES 07 A, Using Videos in Education
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper explores student-teachers’ views about the usability of museum websites both for personal and professional purposes. The expansion of the World Wide Web has influenced every aspect of our life. It is not therefore surprising that museums, galleries and other cultural organizations have adopted the web as a mode of communication, and that virtual visits to museums are becoming very popular (Cunliffe, Kritou & Tudhope, 2001, Davies, 2001). Museums, by definition, have a responsibility to communicate the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment (ICOM definition). New media technologies offer now the prospect of a significant expansion of distance learning provision through cultural resources (Kendall, Murfield, Dilon and Wikin, 2006). The internet as tool to implement online learning provides a pervasive new channel for education, that makes it more accessible and appealing to students. Given the above, technology removes time and space constraints, it increases flexibility and accessibility to education and knowledge. (Tianguang & Lehman, 2003).The role of a museum’s web site and the kind of a virtual museum experience that a user gains are topics of current debates. Still, not many museums are conducting visitor research on their web sites in order to have a rich understanding of how a virtual visit is conducted and what virtual visitors are expected to gain (Bradburne, 2001, Cunliffe et al., 2001).
The work presented in this paper is concerned with the evaluation of the usability of museum web sites. The term usability is used to denote the personal sense of satisfaction that the web visits to museum sites generates to the users. The users in this study are of special interest as they are student-teachers. Museums have always been seen as educational institutions and schools share a mission of cultural preservation with museums. Thus teachers, the educational visitors of museums, consist of a very important group of audiences that museums need to reach out as they are in a position to influence children’s knowledge of and attitudes towards museums and their collections. Having an in-depth understanding of their pedagogic needs and how new technologies can change the way they engage with cultural interpretation can lead to the design of more meaningful online engagement with the museum and its collections (Cameron, 2001).
In particular this paper investigates the ability of museums’ websites to attract student-teachers: young people who are born in the information society and who are to become teachers, a major component of every educational system. The purpose of the study is to explore the quality of their online visitor experience and whether this experience encourage and support physical visit (for themselves) and usage of the web site and/or the museum for visits with their future classes.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bradburne, J. (2001). A new strategic approach to the museum and its relationship to society, Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (1), 75-84. Cameron, F. (2001), Wired collections – the next generation, Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (3), 309-315. Creswell, J. W (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cunliffe, D., Kritou, E., Tudhope, D. (2001). Usability Evaluation for Museum Web Sites, Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (3), 229-252. Davies, R. (2001). Overcoming barriers to visiting: raising awareness of, and providing orientation and navigation to, a museum and its collections through new technologies, Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (3), 283-295. Dyson, M. & Moran, K. (2000). Informing the design of web interfaces to museum collections, Museum Management and Curatorship, 18 (4), 391-406. Kavakli, E. and Bakogianni, S. (2002) Evaluating the Usability of Museum Websites - Research Conducted with Students of the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, 1st Museology Conference, Mytilene, Greece, May 31 - June 2, 2002, pp. 141-154 (in Greek) Kendall, S., Murfield, J. Dillon, J. & Wilkin, A. (2006). Education outside the classroom: research to identify what training is offered by initial teacher training institutions. Research report. National Foundation for Educational Research. London, England. Nielsen, J. (2000), Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, New Riders Publishing, 2000. Tianguang G. & Lehman, J. (2003). The effects of different levels of interaction on the achievement and motivational perceptions of college students in a web-based learning environment. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 14 (4), 367-387. Wallace, M. (2001), Building Museum Brands for the Next Generation: Web Sites that Reach and Keep Young People, in “Proceedings of Museums and the Web 2001”, 15-17 March 2001, Seattle, Washington.
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