Enhancing Educational Actions in Museums Through Virtual Learning Communities

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show that it is possible to stimulate informal learning in museums by means of virtual communities based on repositories of learning objects, communicatory tools and the production of learning objects by the visitors. The focus of the work is to stimulate informal learning by motivating the participation/involvement of the visitor in the activities of a virtual community of museum’s visitors, following the assumption that information, communication, interaction and cooperation are essential for the learning process in the informal context of museums. We believe that the informal learning process that can be provided by virtual communities, together with learning resources like learning objects, can provide the necessary means for the educational actions in museums. In view of this, we have built and successfully experimented with CV-Muzar, a learning object-based virtual community environment for the Augusto Ruschi Zoobotanic Museum at UPF, that we report in this paper.