Blurred Boundaries

By Herminia Din and William B. Crow

After traveling for several hours on a crowded bus one chilly morning in early April, a group of high school students enters the recently renovated Visitor Center of Gettysburg National Park. They see articles and artifacts from the Civil War: Union and Confederate soldiers’ uniforms, a wall of rifles and a display of flags from the period. They move through the galleries, stopping from time to time to listen to a guide who explains the history of the Civil War. They ask some questions, listen to their guide and spend time looking closely at the objects on view. After about an hour in the Visitor Center, they walk outside and move to the Cyclorama, an immersive, multimedia display that tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg through narrative, dioramas, lights and special effects. As the group moves outside, they notice the air has started to warm from the sun, and the fog that had settled in that morning has started to clear. They look out toward the rolling hills and see the landscape, birds flying overhead and they notice the quiet. They take a short bus ride away from the visitors center and step onto the ground. The morning dew is on the grass. One student asks the guide, “So is this the place?” and the guide responds, “Yes, this is it. Below our feet is the ground where thousands of soldiers died in 1864 during the largest battle ever fought on American soil.”

A few hundred miles east of Gettysburg, a group of ten adult visitors considers what it would have been like to live in a 350-square-foot apartment on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1860s. Surrounded by the hubbub of rapidly growing communities of recently arrived immigrants, families were fortunate to find any kind of housing in the land of opportunity. They arrived to find challenges that are difficult to fathom today. Families of four, six or even eight would inhabit small cramped quarters, use a common outhouse behind the building or, if they were lucky, a toilet in the hallway. They would cautiously live and work to avoid the ever-present danger of fire and disease. Today, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum invites visitors to experience these living quarters in a variety of first-person interpretative programs and conversations and is very much about the location and experience of walking through these living quarters.

Typically, museums can draw strength from their physical places. Sometimes this is an actual historic site where an event happened or a unique environment that can be examined with both a historical and contemporary lens. The smell, size and scale and ambience of a place can greatly expand our understanding of a museum and of the objects themselves. Further, experiencing both the physical and cultural landscape of a physical place can deepen our understanding of location, objects, history, even ourselves. What was it like to walk across the landscape of Pennsylvania in the 1860s? How do the rolling hills, the trees and the sweet smell of the grass inform our understanding of this location? What would it have been like to live on the Lower East Side in the same period and how is that neighborhood similar or different today?

The physical location of a museum can be one of its greatest assets but also one of its greatest challenges. How many of us would love to visit the Adirondack Museum in the mountains of New York state or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House? But alas, we do not have plans to travel to the mountains when the Adirondack Museum is open (seasonally), nor can we visit rural western Pennsylvania to see the Wright architectural masterpiece. How many times have we heard the laments of museum professionals as they exclaim “our visitors can’t find us,” or “since we’re out in the boondocks we don’t get many visitors.” Even urban institutions complain, “Parking is such a nightmare that visitors don’t want to come in.”

At times, place can be arbitrary in the museum context. Consider the times when you have toured a site that has been moved or rebuilt, visited a museum that now lives in a brand new building downtown or enjoyed a rural museum that is off the beaten path. How much of your museum experience was essential to that particular place? As we stand in front of a painting or sculpture, we hear lectures and information in the realms of biography, history or context—important items to consider but often not critical to our specific time and place. How connected are we in the moment of learning to our physical surroundings?

All of these questions can be debated. Ideally, of course, we would like to have our visitors physically with us as much as possible. At the core, this is a question of uniqueness: What are the special qualities of our museums that must be experienced and contemplated within the walls of the museum building and how do those experiences relate to the visitors? At the same time, museums are uniquely poised to facilitate different types of experiences that can occur offsite or online. Those can also be powerful and meaningful for visitors and still aligned with a museum’s vision and mission.

Place-based education, a rising field that has its roots in environmental and ecological education, theorizes that learners connect best to subjects and topics grounded in their own daily lives, experiences and communities. Rather than discussing national or global issues in an abstract, textbook-centric way, advocates of place-based education posit that learners should learn about their own surroundings, their community members and their environments first-hand in order to have deep, personal experiences. In The School and Society, John Dewey advocated an experiential approach to student learning in the local environment: “Experience [outside the school] has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it.” Dewey understood the power of place in creating meaningful educative experiences.

In specificity, it is about the unique qualities of the museum object, the character of the site, the experiential qualities of the location; and in the universal it is how these connect with the visitor’s daily life, how it is relevant, what kinds of essential questions or universal themes are discovered. What does it mean to have a localized experience? How much of our own experiences that originate outside the physical location of the museum connect with our experiences inside the museum?

If we ask our visitors to reflect on topics that draw upon their own unique and personal backgrounds, digital environments provide a rich way to do it. Online learning can serve as a bridge between these worlds and help museums expand their boundaries.

When considering the unique qualities of your institution or aspects of the learning that happens within the building a key element to consider is, of course, your visitors. One should ask not only who these visitors are but also where they are. Spend time examining who is currently entering the museum, which groups might be underserved or who the potential audience might be. There may be individuals, groups or communities that you would like to reach in your educational endeavors that in the past have been limited to physical location.

The idea of a virtual visit or a distance experience has been around for some time. For well over two decades, museums have utilized videoconferencing as a potential solution. At first these programs were a means to essentially broadcast content to the learners, but recently they have become more interactive, with educators and presenters using inquiry-based approaches and document cameras to enliven the experience. However, while videoconferencing has its strength in bridging distance, both the content provider and the end-users must possess specialized equipment in order to connect with one another.

Besides the issues of physical place in the question “Where are your visitors?” one should also consider the more metaphorical level of the question. Where are your visitors in terms of their preparedness to try new online learning as a means to engage with the museum? This means access to computers and the Internet but also their psychographic readiness to try this type of learning as a means to experience the museum. While sometimes museums make the erroneous assumption that only students and teens are interested in technology, online communication has become a lifeline for senior citizens, families who live in rural settings and individuals with disabilities. We should also consider the different levels of engagement that are needed for different types of visitors. An online learning program for seasoned, regular visitors would include types of interactions and information different from one offered to the novice museum visitor.

Finally, it is necessary to examine our own relationship to the museum and to an online learning endeavor. Does the museum staff work onsite at the building or are there staff members who work part-time or even at an offsite location? How could we benefit from involving educators or guest speakers from other locations or institutions? Beyond the considerations of physical location, is our current museum staff ready to undertake an experimental project in online education?

After considering where museum visitors and staff are, one might consider an equally important facet: When are museum visitors and staff available? As museum visitors attend programs during their leisure time, evenings, weekends, even holidays, museum staff must also be present for these programs. Beyond the traditional 9-5 workday, staff often arrange and rearrange schedules in order to be present for our visitors. Online learning can push the issue of scheduling and workday into a different terrain because of the high degree of flexibility, at times liberating the museum professional from traditional scheduling confines.

Today a typical routine for a museum professional might include checking e-mail in the morning and responding to questions about a particular program or event. Later in the day, we interact with that same person by phone, conduct a program with a group in the galleries, and then in the afternoon see colleagues in a group meeting. At the end of the day as we leave the office for an appointment, we might add to a conversation that we began in the morning on our mobile device with a few questions to be discussed later in the week. We check e-mail again or add to an online document that the group has created to brainstorm the project at the end of the evening.

While this is typical for our work lives, we see a similar pattern in our personal lives. We continue conversations over time and over media, often in bits or short passages, and we continue to revisit them. It is clear that we and our visitors are learning how to communicate in different ways and over different amounts of time.

At first glance, one might question such a seemingly fragmented museum experience. What about an extended encounter with a museum object that lasts 20 or 30 minutes or even longer than an hour? Some museum visitors and educators proclaim that these types of extended experiences are ideal for moments of personal and collective discovery or perhaps should be the sole focus of museum education. However, we also see that museum visitors learn over time and sometimes are not even aware of what has been learned until long after the onsite visit to the museum. One might consider the example provided by John Falk and Lynn Dierking. In their seminal work Learning from Museums, they describe the experience of two young women who visited a natural history museum exhibition. While they both visited the same exhibition, they recalled different types and amounts of information. When the researchers followed up with these museumgoers several months later, they had connected their learning to other experiences in their lives and deepened their understanding.

A challenge that we must consider is not only how and where we work but also when we work with our visitors and with one another. As we enter into online conversations and activities with visitors, we may need to shift our schedules to meet the needs of these learners. However, this may also be an opportunity to escape the confines of a traditional schedule. We will need to reconsider what a program format might look like as it unfolds over several days or weeks online. Although this can prove to be one of the most non-traditional aspects of online learning, it also offers new and potentially rewarding ways to engage with our visitors.

In a typical museum-based education program, visitors are welcomed, enter the galleries, spend about an hour together, then continue their visit on their own or leave. In online teaching and learning, the experience may last an hour, or several, or may unfold over a period of days, weeks or months. Participants may have an intensive, live experience for only 60 minutes or a more intermittent, informal exchange over 60 days. As learners log on either simultaneously or on their own schedules, different types of interaction can unfold. Let us examine the three primary approaches to online teaching and learning—synchronous, asynchronous and blended—and see how these might affect museum education practice.

Synchronous interaction in an online environment occurs when all participants are online simultaneously. This happens through chat, instant messaging, live webinar technology or other means. The educator (sometimes called the moderator in synchronous environments) and participants may hear and see one another through webcams and microphones, but may also utilize a number of interactive multimedia tools such as file sharing, whiteboards and virtual breakout rooms.

Similar to an onsite, in-person experience, the strength of the synchronous experience is spontaneous interaction and the opportunity to respond to ideas and questions in real time. The educator is placed in the role of “moderator” and participants may interact in real time, developing bonds and cohesion similar to those that occur in a physical setting. While some of the approaches and pedagogies of synchronous online learning are different from in-person teaching, educators are faced with many of the same issues that occur in a typical onsite museum program. These include balancing conversations so that many voices can be heard, keeping the session interactive (drawing, writing and multimedia aspects can be incorporated into these platforms) and ensuring that all participants feel welcomed, respected and safe.

Synchronous sessions are convenient for the participants because interaction occurs on their “turf”—at home or wherever they have access to a computer and the Internet. While museums want visitors to enter their physical doorways, we should not undervalue this aspect of outreach and of dissolving barriers through live interaction with a museum’s staff. In a sense, the museum can be in the homes and daily lives of the visitors in an active and engaging way.

In asynchronous interaction, the educator and the participants are online at different times, and participants can complete activities and add to conversations when they are able. As participants contribute to threaded discussion, blogs or collaborative wiki projects, they work at a pace that follows their own time and schedules. This is not to say that participants or educators can log on infrequently or haphazardly with different degrees of intensity and have the same outcome. Asynchronous interaction has a set of parameters that are established by an educator in advance. Depending on the scope of the program, participants may be asked to log in once a day, every 48 hours, or only two or three times per week. Expectations are established from the outset.

Because the interaction may unfold and progress over a series of days or weeks, rather than seconds or minutes in a live situation, both educators and participants have a different relationship to the encounter. As threaded discussions are built and blog entries drafted, both the educator and the participants can take time to consider and craft their contributions in ways that are different from a typical onsite program. After doing some initial research, one might add information, links and multimedia to a conversation. Other participants might use their blogs as personal, reflective journals about their experiences in the program over several weeks.

This opportunity to gather one’s thoughts can fundamentally change the nature of the conversations that happen in the online environment. Often participants will contribute information about their daily lives and how a current event connects with a topic that is being discussed online. They might post photographs and links to useful resources, or create and share a document that makes their point more effectively than would a text entry or even verbal exchange.

Another characteristic of asynchronous online learning is its cumulative nature. As wikis are built and edited, as lists of Web links are posted and shared, all of the information is gathered, compiled and archived for every member of the group to access. As documents and conversations develop and accumulate, participants may re-visit them, add to them or even discover that their ideas and opinions have shifted over time.

Ultimately we simply want our visitors to come to our institutions. It is useful to consider how you might invite participants in online programs to come to the museum. While this might not be realistic or possible for all participants, you may find that the online interaction encourages participants to travel to your institution, even if they are located at a far distance. Beyond increasing visitation to the museum, what you may also find is that these learners, having been immersed in an online experience with the museum beforehand, arrive at your institution as different types of visitors, creating the blended approach to online learning.

Because online learners have spent time interacting with museum staff and thinking about the subject matter, they will arrive prepared to ask different types of questions. They may bring in contextual information that has been studied or may include references to activities and people that were part of the online program. Working with a group of learners who have been immersed in the subject or primed for their museum experience can challenge museum educators to consider new ways of interacting with visitors on-site. It may be useful and necessary to focus more attention on the physical or relational aspects of objects in the collections during these experiences, rather than on other types of “outside information.” In developing blended programs, one might also consider whether the online experience occurs before, during or after the in-person visit to the museum.

Online learning has the potential to impact museums and museum education practice, not only through expanding our notions of the physical boundaries of our institutions and potential for outreach but through dramatic shifts in how and when we interact with our visitors. As we interact with these learners from diverse geographic areas, and over longer period of time, we should consider how these exchanges benefit our local participants, our selves and our institutions.