National Museums Online Learning Project 2006-9
Project summary
Introduction
The National Museums Online Learning Project, funded by the Treasury's Invest to Save initiative, and sponsored by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is a significant new partnership project involving 9 national museums (British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane's Museum, Tate, The Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum is the lead partner.
The project aims to get partner museum websites better used, engage new audiences and transform the way they think about and use existing digital collections. We are developing a range of innovative and exciting online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation.
It is a unique project that requires participating national museums to work together in a truly collaborative and creative way, sharing expertise and resources across their institutions, and across departments, including learning and interpretation, online and curatorial.
Latest design from the WebQuests application.
Schools
For school-based learning, we are creating enquiry-based activities called WebQuests. A WebQuest is an online educational tool for use by pupils and teachers, promoting open-ended investigation to solve specific tasks. Each WebQuest will present a task or range of tasks that require pupils to use at least 3 partner collections online for their research and exploration, recording of information, and towards their presentation of ideas. Although the WebQuests will sit on each partner's website they will enable students to search across all the partner online collections to research material to complete the quest.
We believe that WebQuests as a learning resource will benefit schools by providing:
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High-quality trusted teaching materials across the key stages
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New ways of using museum resources related to the curriculum
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Resources that will encourage pupils to make critical use of information found on the web - processing information rather than 'cut and paste'
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Flexible resources that can fit well into a scheme of work - the duration may vary from a single lesson to a series of lessons within a topic, or even as homework
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Scope for differentiation and opportunity to address different learning styles
For the launch of the project, 100 WebQuests will be created across the key stages and curriculum areas.
Latest design from the Creative Journeys website.
Lifelong learners
With the Creative Journeys* (title to be finalised) concept, we are creating a social web application that will enable users to search across the museum partner collections, document how the collections have inspired their own creative work and process, and share their work and ideas with a like-minded community. We want to enable users to access and interact with the collection(s) in ways that are meaningful to them, and therefore the 'creative journey' experience should offer as broad a range of activity as possible. One of the key challenges is ensuring that the application is relevant to the range of partner museums whose audiences may have different relationships with specific collections. We mustn't assume that every user will be engaged in artistic creativity, some users could be using the collections for activities as diverse as family history research, personal development, and in their work life.
The Creative Journeys application will enable users to create and post their journeys on the partner museum websites. Using web technologies to help present their journeys, users will be able to author their own content incorporating text, images and other media (their work will be stored in personal 'notebooks'). They will be able to publish and share their notebooks with other users on the partner websites as well as comment on other user's notebooks, build up their profiles, interact online and maintain private spaces. This will further develop the community environments that would have built up on the individual partner websites. Users will also be able to search across the partner collections, and add objects to their notebooks to use alongside their own created content.
Along with being able to publish their own and browse other people's notebooks, we also want to provide opportunities for users to develop skills that will build confidence in using different web functionality. We hope that by offering users different ways to explore and become immersed in the collections, they will be encouraged to actively participate in the writing and sharing of their different notebooks. We hope users will have opportunities to explore content in a variety of different ways, and ensures users can maximise the creative potential that the web has to offer.
Videos
For the launch of the project, 30 example Creative Journeys videos will be produced demonstrating how the partner collections have inspired different individuals in their creative endeavours.
Some videos already completed include:
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Vivienne Westwood - how specific objects from the Wallace Collection are a source of inspiration for her, how it has influenced her fashion creations, but also how its contents and its ethos align with her Active Resistance to Propaganda Arts Manifesto, and her view of art.
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Tony Robinson - exploring the British Museum through Tony's eyes. We focus on three very different pieces, and through them we discover why he loves and is inspired by the British Museum, from archaeological treasures, to historical small print.
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Harbinder Singh,is the Director of the Maharajah Duleep Singh Centenary Trust. In this film, we tell the story of the Anglo Sikh Heritage Trail - an initiative that he developed. Harbinder talks about the detective work carried out to link these treasures together, from ship inventories, to the various collections and archives of leading cultural institutions. We feature trail objects from the collections at the V&A and the Wallace.
Federated search
We are implementing a federated search across the partner collections. This will enable WebQuest and Creative Journeys users to search at an object level across all partner collections.
This search is an important and unique element of this project, and is separate and in addition to, each partner's existing search facility. The search will, for the first time, put millions of objects from UK national museums at the fingertips of each user.
Project team
The project is managed by a dedicated core project team based at the V&A Museum, and six content writers based around the partner museums.
Links to original implementation plans 2006
View the National Museums Online Learning Project Implementation Plan Document 1 as a PDF
View the National Museums Online Learning Project Implementation Plan Document 2 as a PDF
Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950
From 19 May 2012 the V&A celebrates the opening of the newly renovated Fashion Galleries with an exhibition of beautiful ballgowns, red carpet evening dresses and catwalk showstoppers.
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The Public Catalogue Foundation: Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in the Victoria and Albert Museum
The national inventory of oil paintings in public ownership
Buy nowEvent - Get Online with the V&A
Wed 31 August 2011–Wed 13 June 2012
WORKSHOP: Join one of our free training sessions for new internet users.
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