WebQuests - National Museums Online Learning Project
Carolyn Royston, Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom
This project is a significant new partnership involving 9 UK national museums: British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane's Museum, Tate, The Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
We have developed online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation.
For lifelong learners, we have created a social web application called Creative Spaces that will enable users to document how the collections have inspired their own creative activities. Users can also share their ideas through text, images and videos, particularly where these are related to the museums’ collections; making connections with others with similar interests, entering into dialogue with others and forming groups around specific topics.
For students, WebQuests are curriculum-based activities that use the partners’ online museum collections as part of an interactive and engaging experience. WebQuests encourage children to think critically and to use museum objects in new and exciting ways.
Each WebQuest will present a task or range of tasks that require pupils to use the partner's online collections for their research and exploration, recording of information, and towards their presentation of ideas. Although the WebQuests will sit on each partner's website they will enable students to search across all the partner online collections to research material to complete the quest. For the launch of the project, 100 WebQuests have been created by the partner museums and galleries.
Demonstration: Demonstrations 2 [Close Up]
Keywords: education, web 2.0, learning, partnership, federated search, collections
