FACILITATING CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY IN ONLINE
MUSEUM VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
Cui Binyue and Yokoi Shigeki
Dept. System and Social Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science
Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
Keywords: Constructivism Study, Online Museum, Social Media.
Abstract: With the development of Web 2.0 technologies, online museums generally attract online visitors to
constructivism study which is related but not limited to the physical experience in a real museum.
Constructivism study theory indicates that the study will be happened most effectively when learners create
physical artifacts or discuss with fellow learners around certain topics or knowledge. In this paper, we
address integrating social media with online museum, forming the circle of attracting users, supporting
communication, accumulating knowledge, disseminating knowledge via social media and then attracting
more users. During this circle, facilitate users’ constructivism study by providing contextual knowledge
relevant to a certain collection and make learning be a social activity via social media.
1 INTRODUCTION
Online museum has been acknowledged by most
people as a unique method to spread knowledge of
different fields and evoke their interests to learn
more online. It popularizes professional or historical
knowledge among people especially young persons
who master skills to communicate one another
interactively on internet via countless and new
emerging social media.
As a conspicuous function of modern museum,
public education of museum plays a very important
role in school education and social education. The
appearance of online museums obviously brings a
broad platform for physical museums to fulfil their
public education obligation. Therefore, besides basic
information of collection, many famous online
museums try to provide online users with related
references about artworks online, such as what the
metropolitan museum of Art (America) has done.
Online museum is a good approach to push
knowledge to users.
On this occasion, online museum plays a role of
teacher in traditional education model. It defines the
construction or framework of history knowledge in
advance, based on which, adding related information
such as images, videos or other instructions. Users
learn the history knowledge prepared beforehand,
Figure 1: Citation info of a collection in online museum of
the metropolitan museum of Art，New York From: http://
www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1989.314.15a,b .
just like read a vivid textbook-the “knowledge
source” from Internet. This is a typical Teacher-
centric model, the visitors of online museum have to
receive knowledge passively, Mark B. Yeary
pointed out, the traditional instructor should serve as
“facilitator of knowledge”, rather than “source of all
knowledge” (Mark B. Yeary, 1998). In practice, the
result of received knowledge passively by learners
can not as good as accepted knowledge actively.
Consequently, during the process of education via
online museums, some improvements for user
experience are really necessary. Firstly, different
persons have different preferences, knowledge
backgrounds and learning habits. So, different
knowledge and different educational methods are
necessary to cater to diverse demands. Educational
model ought to be transferred from teacher-centric to
user or learner-centric. Besides brief introduction
and related images or 3D models, excavate a proper
model to present knowledge behind collection are
518
Binyue C. and Shigeki Y..
FACILITATING CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY IN ONLINE MUSEUM VIA SOCIAL MEDIA.
DOI: 10.5220/0003310505180524
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 518-524
ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

able to inspire users’ learning interests to historical
knowledge and cultures. Context knowledge around
collections will broaden the breadth of knowledge so
that there will be some overlaps between knowledge
of users' background and knowledge of collection
presented online. Secondly, selections of knowledge
from different sources will enrich collection
database. Finally, inspire enthusiasm in users to
empower them to deeply mine related knowledge
consciously.
Constructivism learning theory indicates the
learning will be happened most effectively when
learners in the active role to create physical artifacts
or to discuss with fellow learners around certain
topics and knowledge. The development and
widespread usage of social media, such as facebook,
yahoo, mysapce and etc, have been integrated into
people’s social life, which gives us powerful tools to
facilitate users’ constructivism study effectively via
online museum.

2 APPLICATION OF SOCIAL
MEDIA IN MUSEUM
With the surge of Web 2.0 technologies, almost all
of the social life of people can be recurred online.
Social media, obviously, plays an essential role in
this process due to its popularity, agility and
convenience. The rise in the number of Web 2.0
technologies’ applications make many researches
focus on social media in museums. Museums
explore new spaces and attract more audiences via
social media’s application, whilst broadening and
deepening knowledge around collections.
Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein defined
social media as "a group of Internet-based
applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow
the creation and exchange of user-generated
content."( Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M., 2010).
In retrospect, after internet's popularization two
decades ago, never before, we have so much
information over internet, never before, we have so
many online tools and opportunities to share and get
individual comments, ideas, knowledge and even
experiences via images, text messages, videos,
sound files, 3D models or panorama photos with one
another by networks freely and easily.
Jeff Gates(2010) pointed out, “instead of a one-
way presentation, our on-line visitors are often
interested in having a conversation with our curators
and content providers”, whilst, social media, such as
Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia and Facebook, is
challenging the traditional flow of information
throughout a institution and out in the world. The
America Art Museum has three Twitters and
Facebook Feeds respectively, one Flickr account and
museum blog which are managed by different
departments. This museum tweets about upcoming
events or related links to its web-based contents,
including blogs, Facebook posts, Flickr streams.
Chan and Spadaccini(2007) suggested, blog can
be used as the first step for curatorial team’s use of
social media, and it is cheap, simple and easy to set
up. Nina Simon (2009) suggested that museums
should bring social media type platforms to physical
museum. Erika Dicker (2010) surveyed 96 curators
from Australia, UK, USA and New Zealand in
November, 2009, and found the “biggest impact of
social media was its ability to connect information
and collections with a new and wide audience”.
However, in Erika Dicker’s survey, he found some
curator thought that using social media will take lots
of time, whilst, they worried about that
disseminating knowledge around collections via
social media will lose their control of contents, or
authoritative voice.
These researches focused on the relationships
between museum and public audiences. They did not
pay more attention to how to gather related
knowledge for online collections so that facilitate
museum audiences’ online learning via social media.
Based on constructivism study theory, learner should
have necessary background knowledge, based on
which, they organize their knowledge construct and
absorb new knowledge. In addition, knowledge
exchange among learners or learners and curators
will help learners get better study effect.
Obviously, social media is a good choice to
carry out constructivism study among audiences and
curators or other museum professionals. On one
hand, it can disseminate and amassing contextual
knowledge, on the other hand, social knowledge
generated by users in social media format can be
used as supplementary to present online collections,
no matter the knowledge is professional or
unprofessional.
3 LITERATURE REVIEW
OF CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY
Jean Piaget has done important works on
Constructivism learning theories. This theory is
inspired by the constructivist theory, based on which
FACILITATING CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY IN ONLINE MUSEUM VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
519

individual learners construct mental models to
understand the real world around them. But,
constructionism holds that learning can happen most
effectively while learners are active in making
tangible object correspondingly in the practice. It is
somewhat related with experiential learning and
some ideas of Jean Piaget. On this basis, Seymour
Papert succeeded work of Jean Piaget in
Constructivism learning theory and developed an
original and highly influential theory on learning
that called constructionism or constructivism
learning theory.
Constructivism learning theory said that
“humans generate knowledge and meaning from an
interaction between their experiences and their ideas
(During infancy, it is an interaction between their
experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns)”
(Wikipedia, 2010).
Constructionism as a learning theory places
students or learners in the role of designers and
focuses on creating physical artifacts in a social
environment, meanwhile, learners discuss with
fellow learners and others in their social community
online (Papert, S., 1991; Kafai, Y. B., 2006); Papert
(1991) addressed that learning “happens especially
felicitously in a context where the learner is
consciously engaged in constructing a public entity,
whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of
the universe”. Young and Maxwell stated that
constructionism emphasizes the construction of new
knowledge by learners, meanwhile, focus on active
learner-centered experience (Young, L. E., Maxwell,
B., 2007). Ayşe Okvuran stated that according to
constructivism approach, “education is given in
student-centric, experience based, multiple
communication and learning environments and
assessed in cognitive, affective and motor
dimensions (Ayşe Okvuran, 2010).” Bruner (1973)
emphasized that learning is a social process,
whereby the learner construct new concept based on
current prior knowledge. The learner select
information to construct hypotheses and make
decision, till put new knowledge into existing
knowledge framework, turn the new knowledge into
a part of existing prior knowledge. This principle is
the same as that of constructivism study.
In recent years, the emergence of internet
brought a variety of Web 2.0 tools for online
teaching and learning. With the changing of
educational environments, constructivism study has
more opportunities to be fulfilled online due to its
benefit of convenience. Museum as the important
public education institute, should explore social
platform around collections so that facilitate
audiences’ constructivism study online.
4 CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY
IN ONLIE MUSEUM
If users are interested in certain collection or history
originally, it of course will attract them to learn
more. However, the majority of existing online
museums as “knowledge source” pushed knowledge
around collections to users. Knowledge about
collections is defined in advance, users have to read
or receive it passively. The data flow is
unidirectional. It is teacher-centric educational
model. As mentioned above in section three of this
paper, constructivism study is a more effective study
method when it occurred while learners are
consciously engaged in constructing an entity or a
theory. It is doubtless, if there are channels for
online users to get more vivid materials relevant to
certain topic or collection according to the
knowledge frame build by the knowledge display in
online museum, they will be interested in the
knowledge. When users or learners are in active
position, they will mine more useful information as
possible as they can. Thus constructivism study in
online museum is carried out.
Consequently, there are several points are very
important during the course of building
constructivism study in online museum. Firstly,
attract audiences to the online museum, and evoke
their interests to historical cultures and heritages.
Secondly retain them and let them learn more.
Thirdly, provide them with communication platform
for their constructivism study. We can build some
channels between online museums and social media,
via which to attract more new audiences for museum.
Finally, disseminate the knowledge via social media
again so as to attract more participation in the active
study process.
4.1 Attract Users
Online museum as the supplementary and
development of physical museum, is carrying out
education obligation in most cases. Constructivism
study is known as an effective study method, in
which massive participation of users is necessary.
How to attract audiences to visit to one online
museum? How to grad audiences’ interests to
collections? The first step is to build a multi-
accessible way for audiences to know there is an
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online museum. The most convenient and simply
way is to let users share certain collection page via
social media. Take Twitter for example, if one user
sent collection tweets via Twitter, the users who are
following him or he is following will get the tweets,
obviously, the tweets will be spread just seems
rolling a small snow ball down a mountain. It’s self-
evident.
4.2 Evoke Users’ Interests to Historical
Knowledge and Retain the Users
In an online museum, the more knowledge there is,
the higher probability that there are the overlaps
between it and prior knowledge of users. The
overlaps of knowledge will lead users to know more
consciously.
When users enjoy a collection online, besides
basic introduction, they will be curious at the related
information and the stories behind it. They may
desire to know why it is famous. If we could provide
the knowledge and stories behind a collection in a
proper or convenient way, we can do attract and
interest massive users, and then retain them in the
online museum for further study.
4.3 Support Active Collaboration
and Communication
in Constructivism Study
Collaboration and discussion around certain topics
are essential parts during the course of
constructivism study. Besides attracting users to visit
online museum, communication space around one
collection should be built for users to study and
discuss at real time. Exploring a communication
space, in which, users are able to discuss or share
knowledge from their Blog, websites, or other web
resources. In active situation, users can contribute a
lot. If there are something interesting about one
collection, user trends to find further details that
cannot find in online museum. This further details or
knowledge are once shared, it will be turned into
useful study materials. When there are enough users
in the communication space, the quantity of
knowledge can be dramatically increased. The
cluster effect can also work when it comes to
attracting online users.
4.4 Accumulate and Disseminate
Knowledge at the Same Time
Web technologies have the potential to expand the
depth and scope of the knowledge Vulpe, M., 2005).
Via communication space of online museum,
knowledge around different collections is gathered.
From attracting users, to building communication
space for facilitating users’ active collaboration and
communication, and then gathering professional and
unprofessional knowledge is not the end of one
circle. The last step is disseminating the gathered
knowledge via social media to attract more users,
thereby to begin the next circle. The evolution of
this circle will be promoted. In the course of
evolution, knowledge relevant to certain topics will
be accumulated gradually from users distributed in
different social media. The circle process can be
illustrated by Figure 2.
Figure 2: Circle of Facilitating Constructivism Study in
online museum via Social Media.
5 FACILITATE
CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY IN
ONLINE MUSEUM VIA SOCIAL
MEDIA
According to constructivism study, the essential part
of this study process is to build a communication
channel among the people who have same learning
interests potentially. so as to the discussion and
cooperative learning among learnersis carried out in
real world, the most popular method is cooperative
learning through all kinds of social medium.
Social media can empower people with Just-in-
Time learning of knowledge in any field. To some
extent, it is universal wisdom, through which, one
can benefit a lot in learning something that he is
interested in and lead him learn more actively in the
course of connection with like-minded people with
whom they can communicate and share comments to
FACILITATING CONSTRUCTIVISM STUDY IN ONLINE MUSEUM VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
521

certain topic, ideas, resources, experiences and so
forth.
In an online museum, social media can facilitate
users’ constructivism study. To a better study,
George E. Hein (1991) pointed out nine principles of
constructivism study in museum, we take two
typical principles, ”Learning is contextual” and
”Learning is a social activity”, for example to
illustrate that social media can facilitate
constructivism study in online museum. Then, we
will analyze that social media will facilitate users’
constructivism study in online museum from these
aspects.
5.1 Provide Contextual Knowledge
Relevant to a Certain Online
Collection via Social Media
Constructivism study emphasizes that “Learning is
contextual”. Learners learn can hardly learn isolated
some knowledge and theories in some “abstract
ethereal land of the mind separated from the rest of
our lives”. People learn new from what they have
known, and what they believe. In online museum,
there should be enough knowledge about collections
to make sure that the users or learners can get clear
guidance and enough background contextual
knowledge to have confidence to achieve more
knowledge they are interested in. For this purpose,
we not only provide users with the basic information
of collections from museum documents, but also
give users visualized geographic information on
Google Maps, and retrieve social knowledge
relevant to a certain online collection from typical
social media –Wikipedia dynamically at real time.
Meanwhile, top 10 latest messages retrieved from
Twitter in term of the title of collections can also be
accessible in web page of each collection in online
museum. Both professional knowledge and social
knowledge formed users’ basic background
knowledge to one collection online obviously. With
this background knowledge, users trend to learn
more relevant to what they have learnt from online
museum. This part of system functions are available
in our previous research cooperated with
TOKIGAWA Art Museum (Nagoya, Japan).
5.2 Make Learning in Online Museum
a Social Activity via Social Media
In constructivism study, “Learning is a social
activity” (George, W. et al., 2006), which means
learning is naturally associated with individuals’
connection with other people. For online visitors,
they learn with like-minded persons or other people
who have similar interests to collaborate, and co-
create content around certain topic or collection,
thus learning will be more effective and active.
Exploring a communication space in online
museum, allows users to interact with other users
who visit online museum or users come from social
media, such as Twitter. Interactions between user of
online museum and social media, obviously take full
use of social wisdom to facilitate ordinary users’ or
history beginners’ active study online. The historical
local cultures or heritages are able to preserve and
success with aid of powerful influence of social
media.
Figure 3: Knowledge distribution of this online museum.
The knowledge distribution of this online
museum can be illustrated by Figure 3. During
users’ constructivism study in online museum, users
will learn with his or her personal knowledge and
knowledge from other users via social media.
5.3 Knowledge Flow in Integrating
Social Media with Online Museum
The knowledge flow of integrating social media with
online museum can be shown as Figure 4 below.
When users visit an online museum by chance, they
will be attracted by the rich contents of online
collections from both local database and social
media or other web sites. Then, they will stay in
online museum and assimilate the knowledge, of
course, recommend what they are fond of to their
friends via Twitter or other social media in many
cases. Thus more users will be gathered together to
discuss or exchange attitudes to a topic, furthermore,
share different kinds of knowledge that come from
individual blogs, special web pages, subscribed RSS,
Twitter etc. Knowledge clustered around one topic
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will broaden the scope and depth of constructivism
study in online museum.
Figure 4: The process of constructivism study in online
museum with social media.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Based on the analysis aforementioned,
constructivism study in online museum is a circle
from (1) to (4), and then go round and begin again.
(1)Attract users;
(2)Evoke users’ interests to historical knowledge
and retain the users via interactive platform for
collaboration learning;
(3)Accumulate knowledge;
(4)Disseminate knowledge.
During the process of constructivism study in
online museum, users have opportunities to access
plenty of social knowledge and countless resources
relevant to a topic or an object, such as videos,
messages, podcasts and blogs. Integration the cluster
of knowledge from social media with online
museum, on one side, will deepen the depth of
constructivism study due to providing users with
much related contextual knowledge by which they
are promoted to further explore in certain field. On
the other side, social media, as social wisdom, will
expand the scope of constructivism study thanks to
covering extensive fields and regions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the Tokugawa Art Museum who
provided materials of rare antiques and valuable
suggestions.
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