Richard Schwier

Now let's consider online museums. There are so many really interesting locations out there, and I'd invite you to share one with us.

Can you find a virtual museum and tell us about it? You might go for the obvious biggies-- the Louvre or Gugenheim and their many offspring, or you can look for the small, quirky and odd.

In fact, you don't even have to look at museums. After all, "museum" is really just a metaphor we are using to describe what we're after in some ways. Think repositories, cool databases, wikis that organize a load of information -- anything that might help us move our ideas forward.

Hey, if "museum" is a metaphor we want to use, what can we learn from great museum experiences we've had in the past?

Let's start by thinking about a good museum you visited -- just one, and your most memorable one. Think about it for a few minutes. What was good about it? What wasn't? What made it interesting? What did you expect to see when you walked in the front doors? What jumped out at you and grabbed your attention when you were there? What parts of the museum did you walk by quickly and not give a second glance? What did you carry away with you when you were finished?

Thanks for this, Terry. I've scanned the comments so far, and I don't know where this fits, so I'll just drop it in here. Our current agendas seem to emphasize formal, institutional learning environments. That's understandable, but I do think there is an opportunity to learn a lot from non-formal settings -- how and why people learn outside of the boundaries of institutional learning. I think we can learn a lot by examining non-formal learning environments in their own right, not just as support structures for formal learning.

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Monday, 12 May 2008, 09:45 AM Note: Richard I noticed the "don't know where this fits" so I moved it to a new discussion topic)