Interpretive Technologies

for the Informal Learning Museum (ILM)

Because the Informal Learning Museum (ILM) is in Second Life (SL), it will take advantage of the technologies SL makes available. By tracking which interpretive aids visitors use and how often they use them and cross-referencing that data with the results from games, quizzes, and surveys, the ILM will be able to determine their effectiveness.

The following list is a sample of the ways interpretive information will be made available to ILM visitors.

• Docents: Volunteer ILM staff will help guide and inform visitors. Not only will these docents greet visitors, answer questions about the ILM and its exhibits, and lead tours, they also become museum exhibits by wearing special avatars to assume the role of significant characters. In character, the docents can carry various artifacts related to their character to demonstrate and explain to interested visitors.
• Notecards: Visitors can only process so much information before becoming overwhelmed, so exhibits can not display information in too much depth. For more information in much greater depth, visitors can be prompted to retrieve notecards containing explanatory text and graphics.
• Multimedia: For even more intense information, visitors can be prompted to play a multimedia presentation just by touching it or using familiar video player controls.
• Immersive Environments: An environment can be created to provide a sense of total immersion. Simply excluding unrelated elements serves to focus the visitors attention and make associations among the existing elements. In addition, each element in the environment can be an artifact with hidden, embedded information that the visitor can access at any time or ignore entirely.
• Role Playing: Some exhibits will make avatars available to visitors so they can assume the role of a character related to the exhibit. For instance, a visitor might wear the avatar of someone living in a mediaeval French village to get a better sense of what life was like in that place at that time.
• Person to Person Communication: A significant amount of learning comes from interaction with other visitors. ILM visitors will be able to use any of the communications methods provided by SL such a text chat, voice chat, and instant messaging. ILM docents can also communicate among themselves and with visitors in public or private mode. The discussion can continue long after the visitors leave the ILM.