Information Technologies for Learning

Information Technologies for Informal Learning

in Museums and Out-of-School Settings

Sherry Hsi

The Exploratorium, San Francisco

Draft v.2, July 6, 2007.

0. Abstract

This chapter presents different examples of how informal learning institutions including museums, science centers, and afterschool programs are being transformed by the presence of information technologies (IT) and how informal learners, in turn, are adopting and shaping IT. Everyday uses of IT are also reviewed to share the multiple practices that learners both invent and regularly engage in to support communication, play, and personal meaning-making in online spaces. Note that while examples for this chapter are predominantly drawn from science education, informal learning institutions of all types use IT in creative ways to support out-of-school learning opportunities, and as a bridge to more strongly link personal interests and everyday activity to topics covered in formal schooling. The chapter concludes with some trends for the future, arguing that out-of-school time plays a critical role in learning; in many cases, one that is more important than schooling – especially for children and young adults who do not thrive in formal learning environments.

Key words: out-of-school learning; interactive multimedia; museum; informal learning; digital library

I. Introduction

In the last two decades, early K12 education technology experiments have generated many rich educational experiences and instructional resources that incorporate multimedia content, digital video, large datasets, visualizations, and collaboration tools. Tested and evaluated through scholarly and empirical research, many early ideas have become successful blueprints for current educational uses of technology. While IT continues to transform primary and secondary education in important ways, it is also transforming learning in everyday settings and in informal learning institutions that offer educational programs and opportunities to school-aged learners. There is a growing recognition that most young people spend more of their hours in learning environments outside of school and that this informal learning time is equally important in their overall preparation for future work and lifelong learning (Rennie et al., 2003; Bransford et al., 2006). Many innovative educational applications, tools, and experiences are being specifically designed to capture the interests and attention of learners to support everyday learning.

Transformed by the presence of IT, informal learning institutions (such as public libraries, museums, zoos, aquaria, community outreach centers, and after school programs) are creating freely-available educational resources accessible over computer networks and the Web to create extended learning opportunities outside of formal schooling. Concurrently, informal learners are assimilating new IT technologies and transforming them into new practices and applications to support their curiosity and interests.

This chapter begins by providing examples of IT applications to illustrate how IT is being used across multiple informal learning settings. These examples are then followed by a closer look at how learners are using information technologies in novel ways.

II. IT Transforming Informal Learning Institutions

Information technologies are being used in museums and science centers to augment learning with onsite visitors before, during and after their visits, as well as to extend the reach of institutions to remote learners.

A. Technologies for Informal Science Learning in Museums

i. IT augments the Museum Experience (Kiosks and Immersives)

A prevalent use of IT in museums is found in computer kiosks or computer touch screen displays that provide additional interpretation of objects or exhibitions using interactive multimedia. They often provide interactions not possible in the physical context of museums, such as time lapse experiments, zooming by powers of ten, or making the invisible visible through virtual magnification. While computer kiosk technology itself is not new, informal learning institutions contribute different activity structures to engage school-aged audiences with new science topics. One example is Nanozone© which is both a website and an exhibition at the University of California Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science (USA). Targeted to 8 to 14-year-old audience, the content focuses on nanotechnology: the smallness of a nanometer, scientists as people, applications, and links between nanotechnology and nature. An interactive floor exhibit in the science hall called The FabLaballows three visitors to play collaboratively in a game scenario to answer four open-ended questions related to the life of a scientist and nanoscale research. Teams are asked to select ahypothesis that answers one question, then interview fifteen university grad students throughpre-recorded digital video, to gather data to test theirtheory. Teams then have the opportunity to comparetheirfinalconclusions to the last several teams to visit the exhibit.

Other innovative applications have been developed in science centers that make use of full-body interactions, often employing haptic feedback, video conferencing technology, and high-speed networks to support real-time applications. Immersive Digital Interactives (cf. Eric Siegel, NY Hall of Science) are a new genre of physical exhibits that use an infrared interface, computer projections, and shadow-capture to create full body interactivity with a digital world. For example, museum installations by artists[1]have enabled visitors to create snowflakes constructed from virtual water molecules that begin to freeze when the visitor puts his or her hand on a wall projection. or walk across a virtual pond to create ripples and interference patterns. Through direct experience and manipulation with virtual objects, the informal learner builds their intuitions about basic scientific phenomena. Through whole body movements, a visitor can paint a virtual canvas to create Mondrian paintings or play a group game of sorting giant colored marbles. Some exhibits take advantage of force feedback systems and video conferencing to enable visitors to arm wrestle in real-time with another visitor in a remotely located museum via a mechanical arm at the New York Hall of Sciences (USA), the Tech Museum, and four other locations. Unlike small-screen kiosks, which can be replicated on the Internet for home use, these uses of IT take full advantage of the public learning space in museums.

Information technologies such as wireless handheld technologies (e.g., PDAs, MP3 players, or mobile phones) have also been used in museums for object interpretation and education at the Exploratorium, the Getty Museum, Liberty Science Center, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Interactive multimedia content delivered via wireless networks provides historical context or background science information to a visitor’s handheld device to promote further appreciation and learning from exhibitions (Exploratorium, 2005; Hsi, 2003). Audio guides, available on familiar devices like Apple iPods and personal cell phones that young learners use everyday, also make it more appealing to visitors and easier to access the learning materials (Samis, 2007).

ii. IT extending the Museum Experience (Pre- & Post- Activities)

IT can also extend onsite museum experiences with pre- and post-visit activities that are made available on the Internet. For example, pre-visit activities at the aforementioned Nanozone© exhibit (downloadable from the website help parents and educators introduce sizes and products at thenanoscale to learners before visiting. Expanding pre-visit activities from an exhibit-centric model to a museum-wide approach, the Exploratorium in San Francisco (USA) has developed learning resources called “Pathways” for educators who take children on field trips to the museum ( Two formats are provided that allow either a guided pathway that provide a set course of exploration, or an open pathway that suggests creative ways for the educator to structure a field trip to motivate learners.

In addition, The Exploratorium has experimented with radio frequency identification (RFID), a tagging technology. Visitors can use RFID to link to personal media created and captured onsite (such as digital photo of the visitor taken from a heat camera exhibit). This media is stored on a web server for later viewing at home or in a school classroom on a personal web page along with other suggested online and off-line inquiry activities (Hsi & Fait, 2005; Fleck et al., 2002). Similarly, the Tech Museum in San Jose (USA) has been using RFID chips embedded in plastic bracelets worn by visitors to track which exhibits have been visited and to trigger exhibits to display information, and to allow visitors to access results of genetic experiments visitors carried out while at the museum. In these examples, IT is used to provide extended learning opportunities to link a museum learning experience to further learning activity taking place in other settings.

iii. IT for distant learners and browsers of Museum Experience

Science centers and museums have also developed standalone virtual explorations using the Web to promote interest in science among remote learners. The Exploratorium websites on everyday science topics like music, cooking, sports, and gardening as a starting point for learner engagement, combining digital video interviews of local community members, online bulletin boards, and animations to engage learners of all ages. In one media interactive on the Accidental Scientist Music site, multiple users from any location around the world can join a virtual drum circle to collaboratively create rhythms and sounds from different instruments.

Web syndication tools such as Real Simple Syndication (RSS), a tool that allows content to be automatically drawn from a content-rich website and published onto a different website, have allowed learners to receive the latest science news in French from “Sciences Actualites” offered by the Cité des Sciences and Industries or in English via “Science Buzz” ( from the Science Museum of Minnesota (USA). Learners can subscribe to news feeds that are then published dynamically onto their personal or school’s websites to follow the latest stories in science, as well as pose questions to scientists and participate in community-wide discussions via a web-based bulletin board on the website.

B. Digital Libraries to Organize Collections in Art and Science Museums

Another place in which IT is helping to transform informal learning institutions is in the area of digital libraries, which provide organized access to high-quality learning and teaching resources for educators and school-aged children. Digital libraries provide multiple views of the structure of a domain, an approach that has been found to be important for learning (NAS, 2002). For example, the U.S. National Gallery allows users to search their database in several different ways: artist names, the medium used to create the art, or subject themes. ( Combined with a general zooming image viewing tool, learners can study close-ups of art masterpieces on their virtual field trips the gallery. They can also create their own paintings, starting with a template from an online original art piece and virtual stamping and coloring tools. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum has used their digital library to create an online museum called “Collections Central Online” ( where learners can try their hand at drawing one of the 27,000 different cultural artifacts and natural history specimens available for viewing and exploring via the Web. While examining a digital library record of a kpwan mask, for example, learners find out about the Baule people of the Ivory Coast, local material resources used to make masks, their rituals and celebrations, and other related artifacts found in West Africa.

Another digital library is the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) created by the National Science Foundation to provide organized access to high-quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The NSDL includes collections like Fun Works EDC, which supports awareness and learning about science, technology, engineering, and math careers for girls, as well as collections of hands-on inquiry-based activities and images from a Microscope Imaging Station exhibit from the Exploratorium Digital Library A recent shift in the creation of digital collections is marked by social networking in which, rather than cataloging by professional librarians and archivist, distributed users not only annotate and tag items in the collection, but use folksonomies to browse personal collections in website using web services tools. Internet search tools combined with the organization and tagging provided by digital library projects allow students to benefit from just-in-time access to learning resources in and out of school.

C. IT for Educational Outreach and After-School

After-school programs have also used IT, often to encourage youths to be discerning new media consumers and fluent new media producers. Around 6.5 million students are already in organized after-school programs in the U.S., and the number of students attending these programs is rapidly growing (Noam, Biancarosa, & Dechaussay, 2003). Not surprisingly, after-school programs have been the focus of recent national policies and state initiatives as a place to provide remediation, homework assistance, tutoring, and other educational enrichment to youth in low-performing schools (TERC, 2004; U.S. Department of Education, 2003). In addition to providing these resources, exemplary after-school programs incorporate youth development strategies — they structure activities to encourage students to develop and follow their interests, make choices about learning activities, and construct their own understandings (EDC, 2003). For example, in a Chicago-based research project, researchers are investigating how urban youth develop new media literacies that are personally meaningful and intertwined in their interactions with friends and family, at school, after-school, and in their communities, given that access to both informational and human resources are limiting factors that prevent youth from fully developing new media literacies (Pinkard, 2006).

Similarly, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (USA) offers a program called “Design IT Studio” where minority and low-income 7th and 8th grade students create projectsspringing from the children’s own cultural backgrounds and interests, incorporating commonplace materials with digital media to naturally create fluency in IT.Students use IT programming tools to be creative, including use of the MicroWorlds program ( to connect the real world to virtual environments. For instance, students used these technology tools to make sensors that track the movements of squirrels and wind in the trees in the museum courtyard and then display the results graphically, create robotic music makers, and animate their own stories. In these examples, the IT and its setting are designed with pedagogical supports provided by workshop facilitators and mentors to encourage inventiveness, creativity, and ownership using IT tools as a medium for constructive activity and learning.

III. Informal Learning Transforming IT Activities

While it is evident that IT is transforming different informal learning contexts, settings, and institutions, informal learners are concurrently assimilating new IT technologies and transforming them into new practices and applications to support their curiosity, interests, and hobbies.

A. Distributed Data Collection

IT is providing access to previously inaccessible authentic practices. One example is citizen science projects, which allow youths to engage in scientific practices side-by-side with learners of all ages. In the 1990s, tools were rapidly developed to allow communities to form around hobbies and interests, allowing the internet to be a social gathering place by supporting international correspondences, community discussion boards, and other online discussions via early technologies like listservs, bulletin boards, and internet relay chat. As early as 1986, the largest networked-based curriculum (National Geographic Society’s Kids Network (TERC, 1990) engaged kids in being citizen scientists, reaching over 250,000 children. These early innovations allowed children to collect environmental data, share it across the network, and analyze the resulting combined data. These activities are still being supported by IT that permit distributed communities to contribute data, like the Great Backyard Bird Count sponsored through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (USA) in which citizen scientists and hobbyists can contribute bird lists to a database for monitoring the numbers, kinds, and distributions of birds across the U.S. and Canada. An individual learner who has access to the Internet from home or the public library can now access and be apprenticed in authentic science practices in truly global investigations.

B.Low-barrier Authoring and Media Creation

As IT tools enable users to tailor their online learning environments with Web 2.0, learners especially teens are taking advantage of creating their own messages and adapting tools to meet their needs (Lenhart & Madden, 2005). For example, learners are creating publicly-viewable online journals, online avatars, personal profiles, website bookmarks, podcasts, animations, and webcasts. Like the citizen science projects, these technologies allow users to engage in a community of practice, but they also support users in active identity construction. A learner’s view of him or herself (and his or her abilities) is an important factor in their learning and making life choices, and online environments that allow identity construction empower youth to explore personal and moral issues. (Bers, 2001). A personal webpage authored by one person are now being replaced with blogs, also known as weblogs. Blogging is currently popular especially among young adults to share new discoveries, personal adventures, and other timely information. Similarly, wikis, which allows simple web pages to be built collaboratively and quickly, have also allowed distributed participants to co-author stories and art around interests, hobbies, and fan clubs, such as Fiction Alley, a site for Harry Potter fans ( The act of creating the web pages in this context mirrors learning-by-doing and writing in guilds to build literacy practices of all the participants. With more sophisticated end user and developer tools, learners can now take the form of 2D avatars such as those found in Whyville.net, an online community with online games and text chat for youth. MySpace.com has enabled the creation of personal profiles listing friends, favorite websites, image collections, and other personally-meaningful digital information.