Handbook of Design in Educational Technology

28 Designing for Museum Learning

Visitor-Constructed Trails Using Mobile Technologies

Kevin Walker

1. Introduction

Museums are broadly viewed as places of informal learning, and most people visit museums expecting to learn something (Moussouri, 2002; Ellenbogen, 2002; Falk and Dierking 2000; Falk, Moussouri and Coulson, 1998). My focus is not on measuring discrete ‘learning outcomes’, but on the processes by which visitors make meaning in relation to artefacts. According to Hooper-Greenhill (1999: 12), ‘The process of meaning-making is the process of making sense of experience, of explaining or interpreting the world to ourselves and others. In museums, meaning is constructed from objects, and from the sites themselves’. What is crucial to museum ...