Museums, communities and digital learning champions: using digital media to resource the cities of tomorrow

Museums, communities and digital learning champions Using digital media to resource the cities of tomorrow Andrew Whitworth, University of Manchester and Fred Garnett, LKL Background Communities share resources... Increasingly, these are gathered in digital spaces Wenger, White and Smith (2009) call this the DIGITAL HABITAT "Stewarding" is required in order to sustain these habitats But who are the stewards? What do they do? Formal, non-formal and informal learning Reports for BECTA from 2002... It is not content that creates a healthy digital habitat... but the process of content CREATION and the LEARNING which accompanies it Resources can be perceived differently... FORMAL NON-FORMAL INFORMAL "Education" tends to define resources top-down... "Learning" is bottom- up, however What tensions may exist here? The 'participatory museum' See Nina Simon (2010); Jean Barr (2005) How does a museum, library or archive classify objects/texts in its collection? Typically the user of the resources is given no role in defining them. There are those (Keen, Thompson) who might argue that they should not be given such a role... But see Giaccardi (2012, p.2): “mobile and ubiquitous technologies are accelerating these changes by enabling users to participate, spontaneously and continuously, in activities of collection, preservation and interpretation of digitized heritage content and new digitally mediated forms of heritage practice.” How, then, can the formal, non-formal and informal work together to help communities sustain and enhance the informational resources on which they can draw? The MOSI-ALONG project Funded by JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk) Project partners: Uni of Manchester, Mimas, LSEN, Peoples' Voice Media, MOSI Model of content creation and validation: "Aggregate then Curate" Case 1) - Cabinets of Curiosities Case 2) - 'Manchester in 100 objects' Case 3) - the Whalley Range site Case 4) ICT skills resources What did we learn? Unlike the other cases, these resources had not been validated by the community This stage is the hardest one to 'push through'... Institutional barriers are apparent: it also takes time and energy A-then-C is a general (ideal) model for the content creation and curation process... ...it can also help in the analysis of specific cases, to show where attention might be targeted The skills needed to nurture a digital habitat can be learned (countering Keen & Thompson's critique); but they must also be distributed. The issue is not one of 'relinquishing control' - but mutual learning across organisational boundaries THANK YOU drew.whitworth@manchester.ac.uk Twitter: DrewWhitworth1