Hello
This is an interjection, I hope a little bit relevant, just to raise a 
thought about instructional learning design in a context that favours 
constructivist learning.

Museum learning is about open-ended discovery, so learning outcomes will 
often be loosely expressed e.g. 'develop skills in comparison of objects', 
'develop tolerance of other cultures'. Therefore it's harder to measure the 
success of your strategies. You may be able to discern changes in learners 
if you evaluate a sustained project, including museum visits, experimental 
activities and use of the linked web resources. Or formative evaluation can 
work if the resources are seen being used in a discovery learning context. 
If you haven't got time/money to do this you can only guess that open-ended 
tools would be successful in reaching the desired outcomes if people seem to 
like them and are using them.

It could be tempting to design more and more instructional or didactic web 
tools, simply because you know you're supposed to evaluate them and it's 
easier to assess whether users 'got it' or not.

Much better to support an expansion of e-learning as dialogue, so that 
discovery happens online in interactions between people with questions, 
people with insights and cultural artefacts. The proof of that kind of 
pudding is definitely in the eating, and not only divined in an expensive 
evaluation.

Bridget

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Cutting" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 10:34 AM
Subject: Learning design


> Stephen,
> >>
> Hi, does anyone have experience of using user-centred design to create
> either exhibitions/displays and/or web sites please? I would be really
> interested to find out how useful you found this approach.
> >>
> Dear colleagues, have you built learning activities into your Museum web
> site?  Was it important for you to be able to demonstrate the
> effectiveness of your designs?  Did you test the designs during
> development, and/or after they were completed?
> >>
>
> This is pretty much established best practice and becoming more widespread 
> as
> funders are demanding summative evaluation on exhibitions and projects 
> after completion.
> They're also demanding that institutions specify objectives and audiences 
> upfront with their
> funding applications - although I would agree that these can easily get 
> lost along the way.
> It tends to be much easier to do formative evaluation on exhibits and 
> micro-sites than
> whole institution sites due to the difficulty of specifying audiences and 
> objectives for a whole institution site.
> The amount of evaluation done tends to depend on the attitudes and 
> resources of the institution but if you're looking into this
> your main issues are going to be
> Institutions don't tend to release the results of evaluation unless 
> they're completely positive. This is for a variety of political
> reasons connected with the press and funders.
> There's also very little movement by institutions to publish anything 
> about their development methods and
> experiences - in general its just not seen as a priority. There are 
> honourable exceptions like the Tate's Multimedia tour page
> http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/multimediatour/re_keyfindings.htm. There's 
> also bits and pieces by Ben Gammon scattered around the web
> like this one http://ukupa.org.uk/events/presentations/science_museum.pdf 
> (google "Ben Gammon" for more).
>
> Given that there's a lot of work going on, your problem is unlikely to be 
> finding examples - its much more likely to be
> getting people to tell you about them in any detail - particularly if user 
> testing wasn't done or produced "bad" results.
> My recommendation would be either to get hold of a list of recent projects 
> from a major funder like HLF or Wellcome and then
> go and interview a selection of the project managers or pick one project 
> which did use a lot of user testing and study it in detail.
> To give you an idea, one project I worked on last year did around 20 
> formative evaluation studies in 4 months of development so there's a
> lot to get your teeth into.
>
> All the best with your project
>
> Joe
>
>
>
>
> Joe Cutting
> Computer exhibits and installations
> www.joecutting.com
> The Fishergate Centre, 4 Fishergate, York, YO10 4FB
> 01904 624681
>
> As of 30th October 2006 I have a new office so
> please note my new address and phone number
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