Museum Learning via Social Media: (How) Can Interactions on Twitter Enhance the Museum Learning Experience?

Museums are rich sources of artifacts, people and potential dialogic interactions. Recent developments in web technologies pose big challenges to museums to integrate such technologies in their learning provision. The study presented here is concerned with the potential of how school visits to museums can be enhanced by the use of social media. The Museum of London (MoL) is selected as the site of the study and the participants were a Year 9 History class (13-14 years old) in a secondary school in Milton Keynes. It draws on Falk and Dierking’s (2000) Contextual Model of Learning and considers evidence of meaning making from students’ tweets and activity on-site. Observational data during the visit, the visit’s Twitter stream and post-visit interview data with the participants is presented and analysed. It is argued that use of Twitter, a microblogging platform (http://twitter.com), enhances the social interaction around museum artifacts and thus, the process of shared construction of meaning making, which can enrich the museum experience

Advertising in Duopoly Market

The paper presents the dynamics of consumer preferences over two competing products acting in duopoly market. The model presented compared the majority and minority rules as well as the modified Snazjd model in the Von Neumann neighborhood. We showed how important advertising in marketing a product is. We show that advertising should also consider the social structure simultaneously with the content of the advertisement and the understanding to the advertised product. Some theoretical explorations are discussed regarding to size of the market, evaluation of effect of the advertising, the types of the advertised products, and the social structure of which the product is marketed. We also draw some illustrative models to be mproved as a further work

Against the inappropriate use of numerical representation in social simulation

All tools have their advantages and disadvantages and for all tools there are times when they are appropriate and times when they are not. Formal tools are no exception to this and systems of numbers are examples of such formal tools. Thus there will be occasions where using a number to represent something is helpful and times where it is not. To use a tool well one needs to understand that tool and, in particular, when it may be inadvisable to use it and what its weaknesses are. However we are in an age that it obsessed by numbers. Governments spend large amounts of money training its citizens in how to use numbers and their declarative abstractions (graphs, algebra etc.) We are surrounded by numbers every day in: the news, whether forecasts, our speedometers and our bank balance. We are used to using numbers in loose, almost “conversational” ways – as with such concepts as the rate of inflation and our own “IQ”. Numbers have become so famliar that we no more worry about when and why we use them than we do about natural language. We have lost the warning bells in our head that remind us that we may be using numbers inappropriately. They have entered (and sometimes dominate) our language of thought. Computers have exasperbated this trend by making numbers very much easier to store/manipulate/communicate and more seductive by making possible attractive pictures and animations of their patterns. More subtley, when thought of as calculating machines that can play games with us and simulate the detail of physical systems, they suggest that everything comes down to numbers. For this reason it is second nature for us to use numbers in our social simulations and we frequently do so without considering the consequences of this choice. This paper is simply a reminder about numbers: a call to remember that they are just another (formal) tool; it recaps some of the conditions which indicate when a number is applicable and when it might be misleading; it looks at some of the dangers and pitfalls of using numbers; it considers some examples of the use of numbers; and it points out that we now have some viable alternatives to numbers that are not any less formal but which may be often preferable