Tip Sheets
Constructing Meaning and Online Museum User Experience
Constructivism is a theory about learning as an active, learner-centred process. It holds that people learn by building up, or constructing, new ideas and concepts based on their prior knowledge and experience. Constructivism also refers to providing a sort of scaffolding for individuals in the form of specific learning activities or instructional strategies. A constructivist educator would ask, what are the fundamental aims for learning? How is meaning construction best facilitated in this case, taking into account what individuals already know? What strategies can help learners construct new ideas beyond their current level of understanding?
This tip sheet looks at:
Characteristics of constructivist learning:
- Lifelong learning is an active process.
- Individuals function as active creators of knowledge, constructing new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past knowledge and enabling them to cope with everyday experiences.
- People construct meaning and gain understanding both individually, and as a community of learners, interacting with people, objects, and events.
- A cognitive structure provides meaning and organization to experiences. Schema or mental models allow individuals to adapt to, explain, and interact with the world around them.
- Educators help people build up an internal mental structure by
providing an intellectual scaffolding. They can offer individuals
moderately challenging tasks to facilitate learning, piece by piece, as
they progress through the different stages of lifelong experience and
development.
- The educator or educational tool provides required resources and guides individuals who set their own goals and teach themselves.
How can constructivist learning be applied to planning online heritage products?
There are many ways to help users of online heritage products construct or make meaning. Web development and production teams can:
- enable users to explore freely, browse at their own pace, interact with online content, share experiences with others, and expand their understandings;
- facilitate and encourage multiple voices and the exchange of stories;
- provide a wide range of active learning approaches, entry points, and points of view in order that individuals can connect with online images and ideas, and relate them to their own knowledge and experiences;
- invite people to ask questions that no one else can ask about the online content in order to become the most aware people they are capable of becoming;
- help users search for meaning, look for patterns, and invest their online experience with significance as they interact with online museum products.
Examples from Horizons: Canadian and Russian Landscape Painting (1860-1940)
During the development process of Horizons, partners made content and design decisions to help users construct meaning and build on their prior understanding of the subject.
A thematic approach to browsing was first established to provide a curatorial scaffolding or pre-existing structure for users. This was intended to:
- facilitate comparisons of landscape art, painted by artists in Canada and Russia from 1860 to 1940, through online galleries;
- enable users to build on their knowledge from experiences with the natural environment in Canada or Russia, and extend that knowledge to the land and painting in other countries;
- offer a coherent approach to organizing a large amount of information and images that reflected the nature of artwork during this period of time (each painting was placed in one of four themes: Roots, Self, Voyage, and Spirit).
The production team also decided to do the following:
- Provide alternate entry points. A link to the artists' biography and artwork are located on every page. This is a more traditional way of organizing art historical content.
- Appeal to different learning styles by organizing content through:
- a chronological timeline;
- a logical, intuitive, easy-to-use navigational structure;
- full-scale images with interpretive text; and
- icons and buttons to further explore images of interest.
- Focus users at the level of each painting to help them discover, explore, interact, and play with selected landscapes (rather than create a separate education space). Users can:
- zoom-in on sections of an artwork;
- access a map to see where landscapes were painted;
- change the surrounding background colour to see how it alters an image;
- listen to an audio tour;
- hear how different music affects how we look at artwork;
- view related photographs and studies; and
- look at detailed images.
Clarence Alphonse Gagnon, Laurentian Village, between 1921 and 1927, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
The use of a constructivist approach in the exhibit allows users to interact with and manipulate images as they browse Horizons: Canadian and Russian Landscape Painting (1860-1940), and encourages them to explore places where they cannot go in a physical museum. This approach helps users to uncover information layer-by-layer depending on their:
- prior knowledge;
- curiosity;
- interests;
- time; and
- reasons for visiting the site.
These online interactions enable users to respond to the online content intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. As a result, individuals build on their understanding of landscapes and landscape painting, and hear the stories of people who lived between 1860 and 1940 in Canada and in Russia.
English Resources
The following Web sites (last accessed February 18, 2004) provided information for this tip sheet:
John Lawrence Bencze, "Constructivism"
www.oise.utoronto.ca/%7Elbencze/Constructivism.html
Ernst von Glasersfeld, An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical
www.oikos.org/constructivism.htm
J. Bruner, Constructivist Theory
http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html
Constructivist Learning Theory
http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/constructivistlearning.html
Judith Conway, Educational Technology's Effect on Models of Instruction—Cognitive Approach
copland.udel.edu/~jconway/EDST666.htm#cogapp
The Exploratorium Institute for Inquiry—Constructivist Learning Theory
www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/constructivistlearning.html
What is Constructivism?
hagar.up.ac.za/catts/learner/lindavr/lindapg1.htm
George Hein, Museum Research & Education Papers
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/ghein/index.html
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Interpretive Communities (PDF)
www.amonline.net.au/amarc/pdf/research/paper2.pdf
Caroline Crowe, Virtual Museums—Purposes
www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/02-03-wt1/www/C_Crowe/purposes.html
French Resources
The following French language Web sites (last accessed April 15, 2004) provide information on constructivist learning:
Ministère de la Communauté française de Belgique, Administration générale de l'Enseignement et de la recherche scientifique, Les courants pédagogiques: Sites remarquables
www.enseignement.be/prof/espaces/fondam/theme/peda/sites.asp
Christine Partoune, L'autosocioconstruction des savoirs: Quelques repères théoriques
www.ulg.ac.be/geoeco/lmg/competences/chantier/methodo/meth_autosoc1.html
Jean-Paul Roux, Socio-constructivisme et apprentissages scolaires
recherche.aix-mrs.iufm.fr/publ/voc/n1/roux/index.html
Service de la recherche en éducation, Genève, Suisse, Constructivismes: usages et perspectives en éducation
www.geneve.ch/sred/archive/const/problematic.html
P. Minier, Ancrage historique et développement des courants de pensée de l'apprentisage
www.uqac.ca/~pminier/act1/graph1.htm
Nancy Brousseau et Jesús Vázquez-Abad, Analyse de la nature constructiviste d'une activité d'apprentissage collaboratif médié par les TIC
www.cjlt.ca/content/vol29.3/cjlt29-3_art3.html