Museum Learning in the Digital Age: Understanding adult mobile technology use at a

Natural History Museum

KCL/NHM Collaborative StudentshipSarah Kounaves

How do adult visitors use mobile technologies in museum settings, and

how might these technologies be changing the visitors’ engagement and

learning experiences?

Research Questions

How do adult visitors normally address their own learning

motivations in the museum, and how might mobile devices change the way visitors engage with and

learn from exhibitions while in the museum?

What does learning and engagement facilitated by a mobile device look

like in a museum context?

How do adults naturalistically use mobile technologies in a museum

context?

Methods

Preliminary Results

• In an open ended question asking visitors what they thought it meant to use their mobile device to learn while at the museum, visitors responded primarily with references to “google” and responses such as “looking stuff up on my phone”

• Although visitors were primarily (96.7%) visiting the museum because of social motivations, 76.7% of the visitors also cited intellectual motivations for visiting.

Preliminary Results

Research Questions

How do adult visitors normally address their own learning

motivations in the museum, and how might mobile devices change the way visitors engage with and

learn from exhibitions?

What does learning and engagement facilitated by a mobile

device look like in a museum context?

How do adults naturalistically use mobile technologies in a museum

context?

Why?• Smartphones as the most ubiquitously used and connected mobile

devices, outnumbering “basic” mobile phone ownership in 2012 (Cochrane 2014), in addition to the rising ubiquity of personal mobile devices in museums specifically—77% at the NHM in 2013

• Traditionally the focus of research on learning through personal mobile devices has been done at schools/formal education or school trips to informal learning settings (Chen et al. 2003, Evans 2008, Jones et al. 2013, Hedberg 2014)

• For example Hwang & Tsai 2011 (out of 154 m- and u-learning studies sampled, only 6 focused on working adults whereas 123 studies focused on students in formal education)

• All despite the fact that adults are a large proportion of museum visitors, and research (Grenier 2010, Rennie & Williams 2006) has shown that they do learn in museums…

• Research has shown that adults use informal learning opportunities from sources such as the media and public institutions to engage in life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning (Bell et al, 2009; Rennie & Williams, 2006; Falk et al. 2012).

• As museums are one of these sources of informal learning, it is important to understand how these increasingly ubiquitous mobile technologies might be affecting the ways in which adults are engaging with learning opportunities in these settings.

• Especially important for informal science learning for two reasons– 1) Changing landscape of scientific fields requires adults to understand new and

relevant scientific issues (Miller, 2010)– 2) Adults (specifically parents and teachers) can be significant influencers on the

career decisions and aspirations of the children around them, and so increasing scientific literacy and engagement with science amongst adults is valuable for that reason (Archer et al. 2012; Archer, Dewitt, Osborne, et al., 2013)

Why?

Thank you!