I chose to report on “The impact of social media on informal learning in museums” by Angelina Russo, Jerry Watkins, & Susan Groundwater-Smith (2009). This paper, written at a time when the significance of social media was being realized, focuses on how museums can harness new forms of “informal learning” brought about by social media (155). Because social media is, well, social, it challenges the concept of one-directional learning in which there is a single all-knowledgable source. Museum culture has moved further and further away from this primitive model over the centuries (159), but not to the extent of the completely participatory model of social media. This peer-to-peer learning model is increasingly integral to young people (157). In fact, several museums were already experimenting with technological environments for participatory learning at the time of this paper’s writing (159). The world of this participatory model and the world of the traditional formal learning model are not incompatible so long as they respect each other. (158) Overall, because social media-based learning environments allow users to share their opinions and to develop meaningful connections between their experiences and others’ (161), these environments encourage visitors to return and connect further with the museum (163). While parts of this paper are necessarily dated, its key messages and examples of participatory learning experiences hold true in our increasingly tech-heavy share-happy world.
While learning was not a core motivation behind our project, the idea of sharing experiences and ideas is an integral part of our design. We primarily focus on fostering social belonging, but users can also choose to explore reactions statistics and all other responses to view ideas beyond those similar to their own. Creating our design required a delicate balance between user freedom and not hurting the chances of social belonging, and this paper makes me wonder what we could have accomplished if we had focused more on the educational side of things. We could have focused more on showing people what people with different opinions have to say beyond having that information available mainly for curiosity’s sake. Again, however, this might have conflicted with our other primary goals. While we did not improve or focus directly on this model of participatory learning, opportunities for such learning are available and visually incentivizized in our design.
Work Cited
Angelina Russo , Jerry Watkins & Susan Groundwater‐Smith (2009) The impact of social media on informal learning in museums, Educational Media International, 46:2, 153-166, DOI: 10.1080/09523980902933532