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Interactive Media MW2007 Young people & museums

Schaller & Allison-Bunnell on learning styles and interactive design

David Schaller and Steven Allison-Bunnell’s day long workshop on designing educational interactive media was one of the highlights of Museums & the Web in 2005 for me. It was a fantastic workshop and one that gets run each year (and always books out well in advance!). If you managed to book a place this year then you are in for a treat.

Scheller and Aliison-Bunnell have now published their latest paper delivering some of the research findings from their work.

Drawing on their earlier work (which made me track down Kieran Egan’s 1998 book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding), their latest research looks at the different types of interactive learning experience different groups of people gravitate towards, and learn from most effectively.

This work, and their earlier papers, are especially important for museums developing interactive experiences be it in the gallery space itself, or on the web. Interestingly, many of the new opportunities afforded to developers at low cost as a result of Web2.0 style tools, we may be able to better reach out to ‘social learners’ than ever before – but we need not to forget those who may learn better from other learning styles as a result of individual preference, gender or age.