Global Educational Leadership
With the invention of Internet and new mobile technologies, almost every citizen in the western world has now access to technology in almost every possible location. These recent developments in technology provide us with unprecedented opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning in museums. Personal mobile technology and available technology is becoming more and more affordable and is penetrating museums as their visitors bring them when they visit the gallery spaces and exhibitions use technology to enhance their exhibitions. In addition, contemporary art is becoming more and more medialized. In spite of this, educational leaders in museums seem less than prepared to face the challenges of addressing learning of in a digital world.
While student-centered and personalized learning have become part of the rhetoric of learning in many museum education conversations, it is rare for museums to have complete strategies for implementing such non-traditional learning approaches. Further, museum administrators who are rarely digital natives seldom have a background in technology and have little intuition to help lead their organizations through these challenging times. Thus, frameworks on learning with technology focus on building teacher competencies mostly in a formal education context, leaving museum educators and administrators with few resources to help make informed decisions in the changing landscape of learning in museums with blurring boundaries between learning within the museum walls and beyond. Even where some museums have been adopted learning technologies, the pace of technology adoption creates challenges for museum administrators to support digital learning without sufficient literature, implementation models, or quality assurance tools to guide them. Obviously, museums are not alone in struggling to adapt to a changing society and preparing for an increasingly digital future; both cultural institutions, schools, and businesses are reinventing themselves to adjust their practice to face new challenges created by unprecedented technological opportunities, however museum are alone in the lack of literature to guide them through these transitions.
The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and practices of technology enhanced learning among senior museum educators and administrators in contemporary art museums in The Netherlands and Belgium.
Renske de Groot
Renske de Groot studeerde aan de eerstgraads docentenopleiding Tekenen en kunstgeschiedenis aan de Academie voor beeldende vorming in Tilburg en voltooide in 2005 de master museologie aan de Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. Ze was 7 jaar hoofd educatie van Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, studieleider van de master Kunsteducatie voor Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten en Hogeschool Zuyd, en studieleider van de Bachelor Cultureel erfgoed aan de Reinwardt academie.
Renske werkt nu aan haar doctoraat in ‘Global Educational Leadership” aan Lamar University in de Verenigde Staten en coördineert de innovatieprojecten vanuit de kwaliteitsafspraken voor de Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.