Museums and libraries in a digital age

The Futures of Learning blog, which is associated with a MacArthur Foundation project, just announced a new blog series that reports on the literature review conducted as part of the project, Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age.

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of the Digital Media and Learning initiative, this project addresses one of the four key questions that defines the initiative: How might institutions change to take advantage of the learning opportunities provided by new digital media?

The work discussed in this literature review seeks to contribute to the development of a field in new media and learning by focusing on the role of museums and libraries as part of distributed learning networks.

The series comes at the closure of a just completed literature review on New Media Practices in International Contexts, covering the unique characteristics of digital media user behaviours in very different socio-cultural contexts of China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan and Ghana, with a particular interest in the intersection of youth, new media and learning.

The research was directed by Anne Balsamo, PI. The blog postings will be authored by her and other members of the research team: Cara Wallis, Maura Klosterman, and Susana Bautista (University of Southern California).

Over the next six to eight weeks, Anne Balsamo and her research team will address the following topics:

• Inspiring the technological imagination: museums and libraries in a digital age
• Libraries: setting the context
• 1. Mobile media
• 2. Teen websites
• 3. Games and gaming
• 4. The case for virtual libraries
• 5. Media workshops
• Museums: setting the context
• Mobile experiences in art museums
• Museum collections: digitization → dissemination → dialogue
• Virtual museums: where to begin?
• Online (art) museum experiences
• Learning from the edges, Part 1: the importance of play
• Learning from the edges, Part 2: technologies of participation
• A bibliography of resources and weblinks