Output details

Web-based museum trails on PDAs for university-level design students: Design and evaluation

This article, published in an international peer-reviewed journal, details the design and evaluation of trails at the Victoria & Albert Museum created for university students in design by curators and tutors from the Royal College of Art, University of Brighton, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. The trails were innovative in that they were not didactic but dialogic, containing and encouraging multiple perspectives, exploring social uses of museum spaces and non-traditional interpretations of museum artefacts. They succeeded in enhancing students’ knowledge of, interest in, and closeness to the artefacts.

Related outcomes included the trails themselves, a detailed summative evaluation report, a conference paper presented at a mobile learning symposium in London, and continuing collaborations with the Victoria & Albert Museum. The methodology for analysis was developed in the author's PhD research, which was conducted in parallel. The article has been cited in the British Journal of Educational Technology; Computers and Education; Interactive Learning Environments; Journal of Educational Computing Research; and in a doctoral thesis: Ken-Zen Chen (2012) Hidden Works in a Project of Closing Digital Inequalities: A Qualitative Inquiry in a Remote School (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Broader findings suggest that technology has a key role to play in helping to maintain the museum as a learning space that complements that of universities as well as schools. The trails were analysed using a conceptual model the author created, which combined a contextual model of learning with activity theory. This complemented the more traditional method of front-end/ formative/ summative evaluation normally undertaken by museums. The model enabled differentiation of the personal, social and physical contexts of learning, and focused on the technology as mediating the students' learning. Walker formulated the theoretical framework for evaluating the project; he also undertook the summative evaluation of the research featured within this.