Museum Learning via Social Media: (How) Can Interactions on Twitter Enhance the Museum Learning Experience?

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Museums are rich sources of artifacts, people and potential dialogic interactions. Recent developments in web technologies pose big challenges to museums to integrate such technologies in their learning provision. The study presented here is concerned with the potential of how school visits to museums can be enhanced by the use of social media. The Museum of London (MoL) is selected as the site of the study and the participants were a Year 9 History class (13-14 years old) in a secondary school in Milton Keynes. It draws on Falk and Dierking's (2000) Contextual Model of Learning and considers evidence of meaning making from students' tweets and activity on-site. Observational data during the visit, the visit's Twitter stream and post-visit interview data with the participants is presented and analysed. It is argued that use of Twitter, a microblogging platform (http://twitter.com), enhances the social interaction around museum artifacts and thus, the process of shared construction of meaning making, which can enrich the museum experience. Harnessing the power of original, real things, that's what learning in museums is all about … Osborne (2004) Introduction New technologies and online services have changed the web radically in the past few years. As a result, our society has witnessed a shift to the means that were traditionally employed for communication and learning. This development brings both opportunities and challenges, for rethinking learning and education in both formal and non-formal learning spaces, such as museums. Many museums, especially in western cultures, have responded to the challenges brought by social media and have embraced them enthusiastically (e.g. Smithsonian Institution, Tate Gallery, Museum of Modern Art). The discussion in the sector concerns the promises, opportunities, possibilities and realities brought by social media: for interaction and collaboration; for engaging with an audience beyond the physical location; for increasing geographic reach and their potential impact; for learning. Yet, despite this promise, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are still predominantly used for marketing and public relations, providing a platform for question and answer type interactions between the public and the museum. Little is known, thus, about the nature, scope and implications of this fast, but uneven uptake of social media in …