on collaborative virtual learning in museum contexts

On the possibility of collaborative learning in virtual museum spaces

I am using this post to reflect on some of the ideas that emerged for me in the intersection of museum learning and digital learning in the group context. The idea of communities of practice, which I have also been reading more about, is fundamental to this: “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger 1998 and nice web summary here Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, 2015) . The community is formed around a ‘domain of interest’ and typically a ‘shared competence’in that domain; the ‘community of practice’ is joint activities/learning; and they have a shared practice, they “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems”. I’m fascinated to think about this shaped around a museum as a learning environment… (more to come on this in future blogs).

One angle on this is how digital media can interact with, and support with community of practice in a museum environment. Reading Scavarelli et al, ‘Virtual reality and augmented reality in social learning spaces: a literature review’, and jumping off into a number of the linked papers, I was particularly interested to learn more about the differences and affordances of VR and AR, and challenges around collaborative learning and haptic experiences.

The Awaken exhibition in the ground floor gallery of Arts West at the University of Melbourne used new technology to powerfully connect students with First People’s cultural objects.

Scavarelli et al talk specifically about museum learning, which is, of course, my chief context. They note “there is some promising work that explores how a virtual museum could emulate the social experience of visiting a physical museum by allowing learners to interact with virtual artefacts with VR or AR together” . Group learning activities are essential to utilising museum environments and collections (in object-based learning contexts) effectively, so clearly if we are going to get students into a virtual space, collaborative learning would also be ideal. One of the embedded articles in the Scavarelli lit review was by Li et al (2016), entitled Multiuser Interaction with Hybrid VR and AR for Cultural Heritage Objects. Li et al write: “Digital technology is at a stage where highly realistic objects and environments, real-time interactivity, and multiuser virtual experience have become possible“… And, later in the article, “Previous research has emphasised the importance of social interactions in museums as they tend to contribute to collaborative learning through discussions, debates which lead to deeper reflections on the subject [12]. These are important and should not be compromised when introducing emerging digital technologies.” [my emphasis]

I actually hadn’t thought about this at all in VR contexts, having imagined that a virtual VR experience was probably a solo one. AR seems a much easier way to have a social and collaborative learning experience in a museum, because it is both embodied and virtual, and can be experienced with devices (such as smartphone and tablets) that are more generally accessible .

[cultural] Object as [digital experience] interface

Li et al explore a cultural heritage digital experience of the Chinese Silk Road using photogrammetry models of artefacts from different collections around the world, with supportive text labels (in English and Chinese). Li et al simultaneously engaged participants who were using either VR (fully immersive) or AR (via smartphones) in a “multiuser, multidevice applicationLi et al (2016)) The AR users had ’embodied engagement’ through being able to manipulate a virtual cube, each side of which had an image of the object from that view, plus text information. In their study of user’s experience, Li et al found that the digital cube “gave users the impression that the cube embeds the artefacts and that the smartphone camera is the key to unlock them“. When a cube was ‘moved’ in the virtual world by an AR user, it’s movement was emulated in the VR world and a sound trigger alerted the VR participant to engage with the AR user’s perspective. And in a way that completely inverted my perspective on the world (ie, blew my mind), Li et al observe: “We consider VR and AR as being from different worlds, using different devices and therefore, the need for objects to be an interface connecting them.”

Cultural objects as portals to parallel virtual universes… Wow.

Social and haptic qualities of the virtual museum interactions…

Importantly, the study by Li et al found that users in these different but simultaneous virtual worlds of AR and VR started by sharing ideas about the appearance of the objects under observation, but moved on to sharing their interpretations and developing conversations that substantiated a social connection: “The awareness of another user through the object as an interface mitigated loneliness for them in a fully immersive environment“. I also found it fascinating that one of the main reasons the users in the study liked VR and AR technologies were that these technologies afforded “more dynamic interactions as compared to physical museum“. This is surely only the case in a physical museum, where objects are behind glass, and the only sense with which you can typically engage with them is sight. In University museums and galleries typically, an object-based learning (OBL) approach has been adopted in the past decade or so, that privileges multi-sensory engagement as a fundamental aspect of deep learning and enriched research opportunities. This shift, known as “the new sensory museology” has been a game changer. (see Chatterjee et al)

So we have a problem, with museums in tertiary environments trying to engage students in virtual ways as meaningfully as they would in physical ways. As recently as 2019,”WANG et al, in ‘Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges‘ wrote: “The haptic sensation obtained through virtual interaction is severely poor compared to the sensation obtained through physical interaction. In our physical life, the haptic channel is pervasively used, such as perception of stiffness, roughness and temperature of the objects in external world, or manipulation of these objects and motion or force control tasks such as grasping, touching or walking etc. In contrary, in virtual world, haptic experiences are fairly poor in both quantity and quality. Most commercial VR games and movies only provide visual and auditory feedbacks, and a few of them provide simple haptic feedback such as vibrations. With the booming of VR in many areas such as medical simulation and product design, there is an urgent requirement to improve the realism of haptic feedback for VR systems, and thus to achieve equivalent sensation comparable to the interaction in a physical world.” [my emphasis]

So, two things jump to mind here: 1. the ongoing gap between a haptic physical experience in an OBL museum context, and the virtual learning experience with objects; and 2. the need to explore other ways that the virtual is BETTER than the physical, if the virtual is all you have (for example, international students engaged with the University’s museums and collections when studying from the other side of the globe). The possibility of VR in stimulating ‘transformative learning’ by increasing the user’s experience of another person’s perspective is something else to think about in the museum-learning context. Transformative learning by using the stimulation of highly affective artworks and objects underpins arts-based experiential learning to promote empathy, in the medical humanities field. What is the cross-over of these physical and virtual experiences of museum and art objects in the context of transformative learning? And how do we ensure accessibility across the physical and virtual museum environments?

And on a meta level, how does this all intesect with a community of practice around museum learning in digital spaces? All food for thought…

References:

Chatterjee, H., MacDonald, S., Prytherch, D., & Noble, G. (2008). Touch in museums : policy and practice in object handling (English ed.). Berg.

Y. Li, E. Ch’ng, S. Cai and S. See, “Multiuser Interaction with Hybrid VR and AR for Cultural Heritage Objects,” 2018 3rd Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHERITAGE) held jointly with 2018 24th International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia (VSMM 2018), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2018, pp. 1-8

Dangxiao WANG, Yuan GUO, Shiyi LIU, Yuru ZHANG, Weiliang XU, Jing XIAO,Haptic display for virtual reality: progress and challenges, Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2019, Pages 136-162

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015). Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ Accessed 15.3.21

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, 2015

5 thoughts on “on collaborative virtual learning in museum contexts”

  1. I remember our discussions about the transformative experiences that students have when they access the materials in the Ian Potter collection and I remember reading reflective essays which made those ‘wow’ moments explicit as they made connections between food, agriculture and ethics.
    I like how you have challenged the view of making virtual better than the actual. How can we do that when the atmosphere, connection, vibe, sensory experience from seeing the right thing at the right time brings such a connecting experience? I don’t know either, but it will be interesting to learn how. Did you use the VR goggles in the Awaken exhibition? These were great, but left me yearning for the feel of sand in my toes and to hear the sea (note that this is not the normal museum experience!). I enjoyed the reminder here (https://youtu.be/1wc6JbMG3QY).

    1. Thanks for the thoughts Kate. I’ve put that great link you shared to the Awaken content into the post (don’t you love editable posts!) as it is such a great, UoM local example

  2. It is hard to beat the experience of seeing a seminal piece of fine art or important historical artifact with your own two eyes. I still remember the warm and fuzzy feelings of seeing Rembrandt’s The Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the first time many years ago. Fortunately, the digital age has made it possible—easy, even—to visit some of the world’s most famous museums from the comfort of our own home. But how can we recreate the feelings of warm and fuzziness in a virtual setting?

    1. Hi Marian, this is very interesting, re ‘warm and fuzzy’. I’ve been thinking about why it is that we can embrace Zoom family catchups and still access deep feelings of connection through this digital portal. I wonder if digital means only work on an emotional level if we have an emotional ‘store’ of responses and associations made in the physical world, which we draw upon when acting in the digital world. In this case, when you see The Night Watch in digital form after physically visiting the Rijksmuseum, you are remembering your first fully visceral embodied response from the visit, then layering it with a new response mediated through pixels. For me, this suggests the quality of virtual learning in museums has some dependency on memories of embodied engagement at some time in the past. On a practical level, getting students to encounter visual arts or cultural artefacts in a physical context prior to a virtual class would work. We’ve tried this with a Conservation Art Curatorship class in 2020, where students chose an ‘everyday’ object from their immediate environment that they had an emotional connection with (such as a postcard, or a decorative paper weight) and practised observation and description exercises on this, sharing with colleagues in the virtual space. THen we moved to fully virtual ‘high art’ objects from the University Collections to discuss.

  3. Great post Heather – and great to see the conversations it has generated in the comments. I’d like to suggest that another promising element of VR/AR or XR immersive reality, is to enable a bridge or interaction between the virtual space and the real world – where interaction in either space is reflected back in a stimulus/response or interactive feedback loop via the Internet of Things (IoT) whereby real world sensors/objects/biometrics/wearables can interact with the virtual environment to make it more realistic – in a sense an information feedback loop rather than just a haptic feedback.
    Alvarez, V., Bower, M., Freitas, S. d., Gregory, S., & Wit, B. d. (2016, 24-26 October). The Use of Wearable Technologies in Australian Universities: Examples from Environmental Science, Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Teacher Training. Mobile Learning Futures – Sustaining Quality Research and Practice in Mobile Learning, Proceedings of the 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, mLearn 2016, UTS, Sydney, Australia.

    Aguayo, C., Cochrane, T., Aiello, S., & Wilkinson, N. (2021, 02/16). Enhancing Immersiveness in Paramedicine Education XR Simulation Design. Pacific Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(1), 39-40. https://doi.org/10.24135/pjtel.v3i1.103

    Aguayo, C., Dañobeitia, C., Cochrane, T., Aiello, S., Cook, S., & Cuevas, A. (2018). Embodied reports in paramedicine mixed reality learning [Journal]. Research in Learning Technology, 26. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2150

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