Gina Hammond

Museum literacy that is virtually engaging

Objects have underpinned pedagogic strategies in the arts and sciences. While recent online units of study enable isolated students to experience higher education, they are usually unable to examine collections. A 3D laser scanning project at Macquarie University creating a ‘virtual museum’ will enable distance students to experiment with curatorial approaches by working with virtual objects in virtual spaces. There are also opportunities for cross-disciplinary experimentation through the juxtaposition of objects from different museum collections. This will help students develop a new form of museum literacy appropriate to the hyper-connected learning laboratories of the future in higher education. Collections and pedagogy Engaging with objects, either directly or through digital media, has long been recognised as a viable constructivist pedagogy capable of providing significant meaning and context (HOOPER-GREENHILL 2007). Object-based learning in higher education has been a source of much recent research (e.g. CHATERJEE 2010; MARIE 2010). It is well documented that the main purpose for the development of many university museums and collections was to support discipline-specific academic instruction (SIMPSON 2012). In recent decades significant advances in digital technologies have spurred many museums to establish an online presence, often including access to individual collection items. The motivation to do this has been to provide better access. A digital presence for collections obviously gives significant exposure to a web audience that are unlikely to be traditional museum visitors. Arguments in favour of digital engagement for mainstream museums have therefore been understood in terms of audience development. The growth of new digital audiences may or may not convert into new physical audiences. Digital audiences however can have very specialised needs. For example, access to online collections can provide invaluable information to researchers, but critical information may or may not be represented in a digital format or individual items may be difficult to locate or may not be represented online. Accessibility to data can also depend on sites that aggregate significant quantities of metadata for those with specific needs in sourcing online information or representation of objects and specimens. The effectiveness of these sites depend on the comprehensiveness of standardised crosssectoral metadata protocols, and there is always debate about the efficacy and comprehensiveness of such systems. Some authors have argued that museums and university museums in particular, have been slow to take up the immense challenge and opportunities provided by the expanding digital horizon. CARNALL (2009) outlined a number of circumstances to explain this including (a) the high cost of employing web literate personnel in the early 1990s, (b) museum curators resistant to change and (c) a fear that increased digital access would reduce the number of physical visitors. For university museums, can be added (d), the low priorities museums and collections receive for funding for digital developments from university administrators in comparison with other sections of the academy. 1 An Australian site is the Museums Metadata Exchange that aggregates collection level data from across Australia, see: museumex.org. At the time of reviewing this site for this paper (December 2012) there was only information from four Australian university museums incorporated into the database.

University collections and object-based pedagogies

Engagement with objects, either directly or through digital media, has long been recognized as a viable, constructivist pedagogy, capable of mediating significant meaning and context. The increasing uptake of digital technologies in university learning and teaching programs provides a timely opportunity for integrating museum and collection data and metadata in these programs. This project looked at the use of university museum and collection objects in teaching programs through a controlled experiment. A group of students were exposed directly to collection objects while another group was exposed to their digital surrogate. Students were then tested at later stages concerning their recall of didactic information. Results clearly show that students exposed to the original object had far better didactic recall over a longer time period than students exposed to their digital surrogates. This has implications for the development and rapid expansion of online education delivery in the tertiary education sector and elsewhere and the role university collections can play.