You can find the transcript of this episode here:

Transcript Episode Virtual Museums with Prof. Schwan Part 1 

Erin: Welcome to the EduTech Xp podcast. We are excited to share with you our interview with professor Schwan, which comes to you in two parts. Professor Schwann was so kind to share his insights and experience with educational technology in museum settings, And we hope this enhances your own appreciation the next time you visit an educational display yourself. I’m Erin, and I’ll be your host today. Let’s dive right in. Thank you so much for joining us, professor Swan. It really is lovely to have you. You are our first guest for this season’s work of podcast episodes. I wanted to begin by asking you to explain in your own words the Edutech in museums area of study. 

Prof. Schwan: I was always fascinated by museums, I have to admit. Since my early childhood, I, grew up in Frankfurt, and my parents, they took me to the Senckenberg Museum, and I was fascinated by these dinosaurs and so on. Later on, I began studying psychology, and then again, I became fascinated this time by computers and, did my diploma thesis on human computer interaction, then went into, educational psychology as my main research topic. And then I realized, two things, namely on the one hand that educational psychology is too focused on formal education settings. So we have much research on classrooms, classroom settings, pupils, and students. But the thing that our knowledge not only stems from, school education or university, excavations or whatever was largely neglected by educational psychology. And there are many differences between classroom education and informal learning settings. For example, the matter of motivation is a completely different issue because in museums, people can pass these, exhibits by. They are free to decide whether to have a look at certain information or certain exhibits. Whereas at school, you have to attend, for forty five minutes, with no chance to leave. So these are completely different issues. And, I had the impression that, there is a lack of research on informal learning settings. That’s one thing. And the other thing is, if you have a look at the history of museums, you will find that at least the large museums always used the most innovative media for presentation, even in the nineteenth century or beginning of, twentieth century. Think of audio guides, for example, or uses of movies in museums and, interactives and so on. So I thought it’s a very interesting interplay between, on the one hand, these types of informal learning, in, in these settings on the one hand, and these heavy uses of educational technology, so to speak, which we can find, at museums. My first contact with virtual reality applications, for example, or, large interactive tables, or display were in museums. Surely, in large museums, were we have more funding and money for, affording these types of technologies. But, typically, these settings are more advanced with regard to educational technology than the usual classroom settings or schools or universities. 

Erin: That’s fascinating because that’s actually a very good point. You are making a very good point that in schools, you have to be there. You, you know, you are stuck essentially your captive audience from a certain hour to a certain hour. And within a museum, you can choose this one or that one and move at your own pace. 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. John Falk, one of the most famous researchers in this field, has termed this type of learning free choice learning. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. If you think of, educational technology as kind of interactives, for example, in museums, then people often do not spend enough time to get familiar with a certain interactive exhibit. The approach, this exhibit, this interactive or digital exhibit, have a brief look at it, and if it does not work, really, or they do not understand what to do within the first twenty to thirty seconds, then they are gone. And this is a disadvantage. On the other hand Museums have a broad arrangement of different things. So this opportunity to have a possibility of selecting those things that I’m really interested in is really kind of advantage for museums or other informal learning settings.  

Erin: That’s fascinating. I think I wonder if those if free choice learning as a as a way to encourage or create engaging experiences is possible within a formal setting? Or is it only really effective in something, as you describe, as museums where you can decide, okay, well, this section versus that section. And it’s probably hardly possible to fully experience the entire museum in one day. 

Prof. Schwan: That’s true. And to think of visitors, some visitors, do not have, the real or should be more familiar with museums as a type of learning settings. We all have the experience that we start in a museum and spend, let’s say, thirty minutes in the first room, and then we realize, okay, there are 20 other rooms. I have just, two hours or whatever time for looking at all these things. And this is a bit of a problem that, visitors often fail to anticipate the huge types of exhibits that are available in museums. On the other hand, as you said, it’s certainly true that having deep, engaging experiences can also be found in classrooms. No way. There is a classroom teaching is designed in a pressing manner, then, the pupils or the students will have similar deep experiences with regard to certain learning content as they would have in a museum. But the pressure on the side of the teacher or the museum curator is different. The pressure on the side of the museum curator is much larger because it’s free choice. And the visitors have to be convinced that this is an interesting thing that they should spend some minutes or some hours with, whereas at school, the teacher can say, okay, the people or the students have to attend to my content, whether design is very interesting or not. And accordingly, the museums place plays much more emphasis on atmosphere, for example, designing the whole rooms in a kind of atmosphere that is… 

Erin: Full experience! 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. Full experience and, stimulate curiosity and so on, which is most often not the case at [classrooms]. 

Erin: Do you think that it also makes it, I guess, either more difficult or maybe easier when you design a museum that’s really engaging, you have a very wide demographic to entertain. Could be children, adults, older adults who have different exposure levels as well. So how does that affect how someone might design an interactive and engaging museum experience? 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. That’s a very good point, and it’s very difficult for museums, that you that they have such a broad range of visitor types, so to speak, from young to very old, from families to individual. That’s right. There are some visitor taxonomies, again, from John Falk, for example, who has determined that different motivations, exist for coming to a museum, from being an expert in the topic of the exhibition to being just curious about this topic to come to have fun and entertainment together with the family and children without any goal of learning, for example. So it’s a broad, range of motivations to come to a museum, and it’s difficult, to design exhibits or exhibitions or galleries that, fulfil all these different needs. It’s much easier at school, because they are the group of, pupils or students in the class, are much more homogeneous. Exactly. There are certainly, still, a number of differences between, but it’s more homogeneous than the typical people at a museum or gallery. 

Erin: Precisely. I wonder also if it affects the efficiency of learning when at the end of the day, in a school setting, you will get a test to evaluate the learning. At the end of a museum visit, there’s no pressure like that. 

Prof. Schwan: That’s completely true. But, we learn usually, we learn, on the basis of intrinsic motivation. So if I watch a documentary on the TV, there will also be no, testing after. But I’m trying to understand the content nevertheless and try to comprehend certain aspects, of nature or of history or of culture or whatever, because I think that’s important for me, as an individual or important for myself without the need to have a kind of knowledge. And by the way, for this is a large problem for visitor studies because all the curators and we as visitor researchers, want to know, what have people learned when they attended to an exhibition. But because it’s free choice, we cannot know in advance, which parts of the exhibition, they paid attention to. And, therefore, it’s not possible to have a “one size fits all” knowledge test after an exhibition, and that’s difficult, yes. 

Erin: So how can someone if you if I were to develop a museum and if I were to try to develop effective museum experience using educational technology and all of the continuing to develop resources that are available, how will I be able to evaluate that, okay, what I’ve created is in the end if more effective than what was there before? 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. There are different possibilities. So they range from having mock up types of certain exhibits in advance before the real exhibition starts and having a sample of visitors interacting with this exhibit, for example, and then interviewing them on a basis of qualitative data. Right. But you have also the possibility of using, for example, mobile eye tracking as a tool in order to have an idea where the people looked at and how long they they dwelled or paid their attention to certain parts of this exhibition, including the question, did they read the labels that accompanied a certain exhibit, and read the text screens, that have been, offered to them, and so on. A third type of kind of analysis, would be to analyze the interactions with digital media, like, audio guides or multimedia guides where you could, record all these different activities that were done, and then you can try to reconstruct the visit. But, certainly, these are indirect measures, in terms of, what have people learned. 

Erin: Yeah. So I guess there are going to be, of course, advantages and disadvantages and how effective or not or how easy it is to measure or not measure these different types of things. But this is this is so fascinating because I know I recognize if I’m trying to record or recall my own experiences with museums, the best ones are with very engaging visual effects. You know? And then, additionally, if I’m able to stick my hand in a in a thing of sand, then I can appreciate the feeling of it, and that’s another memory- 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. It’s multisensory, often. For example, if you think of a lot of science museums in the classical sense, like the, Deutsches Museum, but, on science centers, like the Exploratorium, for example, in Heilbronn. You have a very multisensory interactive experience where you have haptic, and touch and acoustics, besides just, having a look into a class case, and just see an exhibit. And these experiences are much more sustainable than just having a look at these exhibits and so on. So, but many museums, besides these science centers have started or have begun to include these multisensory, experiences. But it’s always there’s always a tension between the value of authentic exhibits, which shouldn’t be touched, not good for them. On the one hand, and then so to speak, the aim of people to touch or to interact with a certain exhibit. And there your digital media come into play, I guess, as an additional support beside authentic exhibit. Because, for example, if you have a look at the or have tried to inspect a certain machine at the Deutsches Museum, then this machine stands still. It does not really work. You have to imagine how it works. And to set an, a visual simulation of, its working processes on a display beside makes this machine much more understandable and comprehensible and more interesting having a look at this static tool. 

Erin: Yeah. Does these kind all of these the way you describe so many of these kind of experiences, they also have benefits to different kinds of learners in terms of their abilities also, like visually impaired learners. People who are deaf or who have hearing impairment. So that’s also the advantages, aren’t there? 

Prof. Schwan: Yeah. Sure. There is a large movement in the museums to support diversity and particularly disabled persons, the blind ones or, people with hearing loss and so on. And I expect for the future that these possibilities of artificial intelligence will push these things a bit further, for example, if you have a look at these audio guides, these digital audio guides, they are typically available in just at least two or three different languages. Spain, maybe Chinese, and German. But, with AI, it would not be a big problem to have many more different languages available on the spot, so to speak, to translate it on the spot. This is one thing. And the other thing is that these audio guides usually may be available in different languages, but not with different content that is culturally adapted to these, different languages. 

Erin: Culturally adapted. That’s an interesting point. 

Prof. Schwan: So, for example, if you do not come from a from a country where that is mostly Christian, then you will have problems to understand all these, Christian symbols in medieval art, for example and so on. So, I think it will be possible in the future, via AI, to streamline or to design audio guides that differ not only in language, but also in taking the cultural background into a [consideration]. 

Erin: You think that there might be a when it comes to traditional exhibits, you did mention that, you know, from as far back as we can tell, there have been different kinds of exhibitions. It hasn’t always just been an image in a glass case that we stare at, and that was it. You know? There have been varieties for as long as we can tell. But then is there a way that, we might be changing the authenticity of it over time? Well, there’s traditional exhibits, and then over time, we have more and more technology and technological tools and digital tools being used. Does that change, you think, the value? 

Prof. Schwan: Yes. I don’t think that it will change the value within a museum, it’s not the museum context that has such an impact on the perception of authenticity. There is the famous, cultural scholar, Walter Benjamin, who in the twentieth century, wrote an article on the perception of art in the times of technological reproductions. And the more often an artwork is reproduced, the less will be its aura or its perceived authenticity. So if you have a famous, painting, for example, and then you see this painting in the museum shop, and then you see it on, posters and on, coffee cups, and so on, then Benjamin would expect that the aura will be lost or finished. I’m not really sure about that. I think the more often people see a Picasso painting, everywhere, the more they will be impressed by this painting when they see it in real life. So the tension between digital reproduction and making a kind of artwork or another exhibit as a kind of maskwear, whether this really diminishes authenticity, I’m not really sure about. And the other thing is in museums, typically, authentic exhibits are most often not replaced by, digital reproductions. But instead they are accompanied by digital support tools. And, these support tools, as I said, make these exhibits more understandable. If you have a famous machine from scientists from Darwin or from, I don’t know, famous physicians, Albert Einstein or whatever, which is in itself not really comprehensible. But, if it’s accompanied by digital support tools and explanations, will increase its perceived authenticity, I guess. Yeah. The thing is, surely, we have twins, so to speak. So many collection items from museums are digitized now and put into virtual museums and virtual collections on the Internet. But I think, again, this helps this has the advantage that people who cannot afford to come to the museum can have a look at these, at these items as well. This is one, one advantage. The other is that I can have a kind of virtual museum or exhibition that goes beyond a single museum. For example, if you have, vermeil, you have a vermeil in Dresden, you have a vermeil in in Paris, and you have a vermeil in New York, then you will never be able to compare them directly as originals. But on the Internet, if you have a really high resolution reproduction of these artworks, you can lay them side by side and make some comparisons and so on. So this is a second advantage of these, digital productions on the on the net. And yeah. Our empirical studies, so the, museum people were afraid that if they put everything on the Internet, people will not come to the museums again. But it seems not to be the case. It’s not a barrier that, people say “Okay. I’ve seen it on the Internet, so I don’t need to, come to the museum.” That’s not the case. According to the empirical data. 

Erin: Wonderful. Because it means that, you know, there’s an advantage. There’s even more you can get from being physically there. And then I was going to ask you about the whole online thing where you now have the reach globally. One museum located in one city, in one country, has the visibility worldwide. So as someone who doesn’t, as you said, have the resources to visit. Can have some sort of exposure to the same kind of material. 

Prof. Schwan: Yep. You’re right. Mhmm. 

Erin: Yeah. That’s fascinating. I love that. I love the fact that it’s so, you can make something so interesting. I mean, let’s say, I was given an a thought experiment the other day where “how would you make a painting into something more appreciated if you had different technologies, if you if you made use of different sensory experiences, and then someone had imagined, you know, wind blowing on the person if there was wind involved in the painting.” You know, that way you can go, okay. This is this was meant to have the feeling of a field. And the smell of whichever flowers and the feel of sun on your skin, you know, that the full experience is possible. 

Erin: Yeah. This is one option to have a more, multisensory, experience, which is a very as you.. the example that you bring is a very creative idea for having these, wind elements and so on. The other thing is to try to create a much more immersive experience of a painting. So there are several exhibitions that are touring around the big cities, where you can move into Monet’s garden or Van Gogh’s, rooms and so on by means of large, huge projections of these paintings, and combining it with augmented reality technologies, for example, this is another option. And, there are also these, virtual reality types of immersion, for example, at the Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands, they experimented with, creating some experiences of, again, van Gogh’s, paintings or paintings from, the seventeenth century, where you can step into these paintings, and kind of walk around, on the basis of virtual reality. 

Erin: That concludes part one of this conversation with Professor Schwan. Please join us again for part two, where we discuss the use of multi-sensory experiences in museums. If you’re enjoying this episode, please share your thoughts on the EduTech Xp podcast Instagram page at EduTech Xp. See you next time!