Thursday, November 6, 2008
Towards a Thriving Museum - a model
Recently, I put together a comic with excerpts from an article that became John Falk and Beverly Sheppard's book "Thriving in the Knowledge Age". It presents a theoretical model for business and visitation, and encourage museums to look deep and answer some fundamental questions. They emphasize that we are fast moving from an authoritarian to a cooperative model of informal learning. They believe (as do I) that the public needs us to help contextualize and synthesize information- not lecture to them. It's a good read for anyone interested in this new generation of institutions. Dr. Falk now teaches free-choice learning and science education at Oregon State. Beverly Sheppard is the CEO at the Institute for Learning Innovation. 
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Interestingly, John Falk and Lynn Dierking teach as part of an online Masters degree program at Oregon State University. The 2-year program is a Master of Science in Science Education with an option in Free-Choice Learning. According to Oregon State's website, the program is for "educators in settings where learners choose the learning environment and determine engagement time". According to Paula Dungjen, an extremely helpful member of the Science & Mathematics Education staff, the program is good for a variety of students who are interested in free-choice learning, particularly those who would like to work in interactive and/or science museums.
Hey thanks, that's good to know. I wonder how this will impact other museum programs... if they will take up the free choice mantle. From my experience, a lot of folks that work in science museums have a diversity of backgrounds- with engineering and science of course, being dominant.
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