The Digital Media and Learning Initiative

Re-Imagining the Museum

The Re-Imagining the Museum convening, held at Princeton University, was a day-long charrette to lead participants, leaders in the museum, education, design, and digital media and learning fields, through a designed experience to think creatively about the related questions:

  1. How might museums maximize the learning experiences achieved through both digital media and contact with physical objects, and
  2. What spaces might be created within museums to engage young learners in informal and formal learning experiences?

The convening began with participants presenting images of a physical and a digital space they found inspiring, to set the tone. They then heard brief panels on The Changing Learning Environment, The Changing Museum Agenda, and a case study on the new Chicago Public Library NewMedia Space. The conveners broke into small groups to brainstorm different solutions to the presented challenges, coming up with ideas to present to a group of teens who joined the convening via videoconference to give their feedback.

Ideas tended to address how digital media could make museums more navigable, how to make visits and discussion more social, how to make the objects in a museum more approachable, and how to give students the opportunity to develop museum-specific skills like curation.

The teens who joined the convening gave positive feedback about the specific project ideas presented to them. However, they were also cognizant of the bigger challenges, such as how to get teenagers into museums in the first place.

The Wolfsonian Institute, one of the leaders of the convening, is working on ways to keep this discussion going and to open it up to broader participation.

Also, for further discussion of the day, please see Spotlight Blog articles:

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