The Secret Lives of Digital Museum Resources and Collections: Pedagogical Practice and Interactions with the Smithsonian's Learning Lab

<p dir="ltr">Digital museum collections are a vast potential resource for teaching, and digital platforms are providing a range of tools to support their educational use. While these collections have been used in diverse ways to facilitate learning, their use has also been documented to present challenges. This research project investigates how digital platforms may enable both museum educators and school teachers to activate the pedagogical potential of digital museum objects in their practice, including how platform design and museum-based practices may be informed by awareness of educational practitioners’ perspectives and practice. This mixed-methods study explores this key question through an in-depth case study of museum educators’ and school teachers’ uses of the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab, a collections-based platform with unique capacities for customisation and re-use. The research adopts a range of methods to incorporate different perspectives on educational uses of the Learning Lab. This includes analysis of anonymised Learning Lab data (focusing on user adoptions of metadata and other platform features), a survey of educator-users, focus groups/interviews with Smithsonian staff, and in-depth qualitative research with school teachers (including the use of interviews and documentation).</p><p dir="ltr">The research draws from a theoretical framework which conceptualises ‘Platform, Objects, Pedagogical Practice, and Learning’ as interrelated, and uses the concept of scaffolding as a lens through which to explore how digital platforms may support educators’ uses of digital museum objects in their practice. The thesis proposes types of scaffolds (conceived as potentially taking the form of digital tools and/or educator-designed resources and activities) which could aid the pedagogical use of digital museum objects. It demonstrates the significance of different facets of platform use in relation to educators’ uses of digital museum collections, including searching and filtering, identifying objects’ relevance to curricula, editing and customisation capacity, evaluation, and access to modelled strategies and professional development.</p>