Abstract:

Museums are vast repositories of materials and objects vital to teaching history and visual cultural studies. Traditionally, museum collections have been available to high school and university classes through fieldtrips and, within the past ten years, online collections. On site (and online) exhibits have made great efforts to engage visitors through a number of different strategies but most of the learning experience is passive, requiring visitors to simply view objects and read accompanying text. In order to use museum resources to greatest effect, methods of incorporating active learning strategies to the study of the artifacts are currently being developed. In particular, this study focuses on the potential of social networks and games to teach history and visual culture concepts and terminology through the myMuseum project.

myMuseum is a resource management game that allows large numbers of players to experience and learn about museum objects by creating their own virtual gallery space with the social networking platform, Facebook. The myMuseum prototype is currently being developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), in conjunction with the Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, by faculty and students representing a wide variety of majors and disciplines: Computing, Game Design and Development, New Media, Animation and Film, Illustration and Cultural Resource Studies. Tangible outcomes resulting from the interaction of students from multiple disciplines and year levels in which the prototype project reflects on their individual class work are reported. In addition, this paper describes the myMuseum approach of combining game experience and web site support to incorporate active learning within history and visual culture courses. We explore game and supporting web site development, organizational challenges and future initiatives to help teachers use the new game for both secondary and higher education.

Keywords:

active learning, social network platforms, serious games, museums, art history, history.