mLearning started out to be a more formal, corporate and academic field. After its initial phase a lot of inspiring more thrilling applications started to take shape. One of the most intriguing and inspiring sectors to explore mobile implementations for increased knowledge creation are the museums. So I thought it was high time that I had a peak at some mLearning or mExperiences from the art world. But I must admit, this overview could not be possible without Michael Sean Gallagher and other MobiMOOC'rs that provided these wonderful links.
Mobile initiatives were always one of the key ways to get information across to museum visitors, just recall the audio guides, or the booklets that can accompany visitors. So it is no surprise that these heart and soul of museums everywhere are embracing the new mobile options that cell phones, tablets... are providing.
Starting with the new initiative launched at the Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles.
The J. Paul Getty Museum collection comes alive with Google Goggles
The Google Goggles team has worked with The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to “Goggles-enable” their permanent collection of paintings.
You can use the Google Goggles app on your phone to take a photo of a painting from the collection and instantly access information about it from the Getty’s mobile-optimized website and the rest of the web. It's possible to fit only a small amount of information on the wall next to a painting but visitors with Goggles can now enjoy the full story online.
For more information about the Getty-Goggles project, visit mobile.getty.edu/gettygoggles or scan the QR code below.
Gallery Tag at the Brooklyn museum
This is an initiative from the chief of technology at the Brooklyn museum (Shelley Bernstein) on a mobile application with which you can add tags to the paintings or art works that you encounter at the Brooklyn museum. The Gallery Tag! is in fact a mobile game, enabling people to add tags to art works, which (the tags) are then openly shareable with other visitors of the museum as well.
Gallery Tag! is a pretty simple mobile tagging game, specifically designed for use in the gallery. Select a tag or create your own, go find works in the galleries that match, enter accession numbers and earn points and prizes.
You can either choose a tag left by other museum visitors, or you can add a tag describing your feeling or impression of a specific painting.
Roam! One of our institutional aims of the Brooklyn museum is to get visitors looking across collections and that’s always a challenge in this very large building. To encourage players of Gallery Tag! to cross boundaries in the building, they gain more points if they tag objects on different floors. Crossover! One of the big issues we’ve seen with BklynMuse is that it’s chock full of information and various paths to take and that can be an overwhelming amount of choice. The recent simplifications are going to help, but we want to implement different ways to get people into that content. As players use Gallery Tag!, there are links that crossover into BklynMuse.
Convergence! All of the tags created go right back into the online collection, bridging the physical and virtual.
If you are coming here with your device hit m.brooklynmuseum.org to get started!MuseumPunk: make your own museum tour and share it with others
Of course apart from the mobile apps that are provided by the museums themselves, there are also those mobile initiatives that are run by the visitors themselves. If you browse the Web, you can find many self-made museum tours (e.g. WalkExplorer for iPhone fans), a nice overview on how to build such self-made tours can be found here.
For us Android loving mobilers, take a look at the mobile Android museum applications listed at the MuseumPods website which cover a lot of (mostly NorthAmerican) museums.
If you are interested in interactive museum applications (mobile and others), be sure to link up with Nina Simon's blog called Museum2.0. She keeps track of great museum apps with wonderful interactions and is author of 'The Participatory Museum'.
