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

Molecular analysis of the ZIC3 and TCF7L1 interaction and its implication in human Heterotaxy

Heterotaxy is a congenital disorder that occurs due to the defective establishment of the left-right (L-R) body axis during early embryo development. The disorder affects 1/10,000 live births, results in the abnormal alignment of internal organs with respect to the L-R axis, and is often accompanied by severe cardiac malformations. The most commonly mutated gene in human cases of Heterotaxy is the X-linked ZIC3, which was first associated with the condition in 1997. ZIC3 belongs to a family of multifunctional transcriptional regulator proteins (ZIC family) all characterised by a C2H2 type zinc finger domain (ZFD). This domain is implicated in the transactivation (DNA binding) and co-factor (protein binding) function of the proteins. However, despite both capabilities, it is still not known when during development the co-factor role of ZIC3 is necessary over the transcription factor role. Consequently, the exact cellular and molecular causes underlying ZIC3-associated Heterotaxy remain unknown. Mouse models of Zic3 loss-of-function reveal phenotypes that resemble human Heterotaxy and exhibit a defective node (the structure that confers the L-R axis during development). More recently, studies have shown murine Zic3 alleles lead to incompletely penetrant, partial (posterior) axis duplications and anterior truncation, phenotypes characteristic of elevated canonical Wnt signalling. The expression pattern of Zic3 during mammalian gastrulation overlaps with a known repressor of the canonical Wnt pathway, Tcf7l1 and it has also been shown that a related ZIC protein (ZIC2) can interact with TCF proteins to co-repress Wnt/b-catenin mediated transcription when overexpressed in cell lines. Overall, this leads to the novel hypothesis that ZIC3 controls the establishment of the L-R axis by interacting with TCF7L1 to repress Wnt signalling during mammalian gastrulation. In this thesis I examine the molecular role of ZIC3 in the Wnt pathway and investigate the functional consequences of ZIC3 Heterotaxy-associated protein variants. A physical interaction between ZIC3 and TCF7L1 was demonstrated by several molecular assays. Additionally, 17 Heterotaxy-associated human ZIC3 variants were functionally assessed in well-established cell-based assays. Four of the human protein variants exhibit non-pathogenic properties as they retain wildtype ZIC3 function in these assays. The remaining variants, which affect key residues within the ZFD or contain a premature termination codon, display impaired transcription factor and co-factor functions: they can no longer activate transcription at a ZIC responsive element and have reduced ability to inhibit b-catenin-mediated Wnt transcription. Loss of Wnt inhibition did not always correlate with loss of TCF7L1 interaction, suggesting ZIC3 and/or TCF7L1 must interact with additional co-repressors or repressive chromatin complexes to mediate transcriptional repression in the Wnt pathway. Additionally, in this thesis I identified several evolutionary conserved domains implicated in transactivation, including the newly annotated SANC and SACC domains, enhancing our understanding of the structural domains required for ZIC3 molecular function. Overall, this thesis supports a new model of ZIC3 molecular function: ZIC3 interacts with TCF7L1 to inhibit canonical Wnt signalling during mammalian gastrulation and correctly establish the L-R axis. Ultimately, ZIC3-associated Heterotaxy arises when ZIC3 is unable to function as a Wnt co-repressor

Employers of migrant women domestic workers from Albania and Ukraine

The views of employers of migrant women domestic workers from Albania andUkraine who are employed either to care for elderly people or to assist with thedomestic chores some days per month or week are focused on: how to locate theworkforce, the importance of the nationality of these domestic workers for theemployers, their work content and employment conditions, the relationship betweenemployers and employees and on the employers’ evaluation for the presence ofmigrants on the Greek labour market

Trajectories of learning across museums and classrooms

This paper explores the use of social and mobile technologies on school field trips as means of enhancing the visitor experience. It employs the notion of a ‘trajectory’ (Ludvigsen et al. 2010; Pierroux et al., 2010; Littleton & Kerawalla, 2012) as appropriate means of connecting learners temporal experiences with informal and formal learning contexts. The focus of the analysis is on a group’s trajectory with an aim to examine the meanings made and represented in multimodal ‘ensembles’ and further, to explore whether artefacts and tools encountered or used inform students’ ensembles and assist them in making connections across the settings. This paper aims to contribute to contemporary discourse on technology-enhanced museum learning by exploring aspects of the visitor experience, such as meaning making across and between contexts

An investigation into the use of a microblogging technology in school trips to museums

School trips to museums are an important means of introducing young people to museum collections and may have a long-term learning impact (Falk & Dierking, 1997). At the same time, activities in museum spaces can be challenging for students who are engaged in complex learning processes. The thesis considers the use of a microblogging technology (Twitter) by a Year 9 History class (13-14s) from a secondary school in Milton Keynes during a trip to the Museum of London (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/). It draws on the view that mobile technologies can create a continuity of the learning experience despite changes in the physical and social context (Sharples, 2015) and contributes to the body of research on how such technologies can best support young people’s visit experience and extend it beyond the museum. The thesis is informed by sociocultural perspectives of learning with a focus on mediating artefacts in the development of understanding in situated learning activities. It draws on the Contextual Model of Learning which views the visit experience in relation to meaning making and situates this in visitors' personal, physical and sociocultural contexts (Falk & Dierking, 2000). This research employs a case-study methodology and adopts a research design that involved a pre- and post-visit approach. Evidence of students’ activity in the museum and the classroom while using Twitter is considered. The findings are based on video analysis (Ash, 2007), analysis of questionnaires, interviews and personal meaning maps (Falk et al., 1998). Evidence reveals that the use of microblogging reconfigures the museum space by creating an ‘interconnected space’. Evidence also shows that the content generated by the students was ‘designed’ for an audience and offered opportunities for new ways of engagement with objects within the context of a semi-formal visit. The analysis illustrates that prominent practices in the museum were ‘live’ communication, documentation and sharing, while in the classroom the microblogging supported the students to connect to meanings made in the museum by providing prompts for reflection and recollection. Learners were able to weave everyday informal practices related to the use of Web 2.0 technologies with formal museum visiting practices. However, the analysis also points out that learners faced some threats in the continuity of their experience and the development of their trajectories of meaning making as reflected in the three types of visit experience: the ‘focused’, the ‘hybrid’ and the ‘floating’. Drawing on this evidence, the thesis makes a distinction between ‘microblogging as a tool’, ‘microblogging as a space to create, review and share content’ and ‘microblogging as a practice’. The thesis also points to three intertwined areas of consideration for designing learning activities across contexts. These areas include: the technological properties of the tools in use, the types of activity the tools support and specific practices associated with the tools and the contexts. This work essentially contributes to the contemporary discourse around studying ‘seamless learning spaces’ (Chan et al., 2006) and has implications in designing approaches for technology-enhanced learning in museums

Cultural Citizen Inquiry: Making space for the ‘everyday’ in language teaching and learning

This chapter presents a small exploratory study undertaken as action research in two community schools in the UK that draws on a blended approach to language learning and utilises methods of inquiry learning (e.g., observation, data collection, reflection) along with web and mobile technologies to facilitate young people’s engagement in citizen-led inquiry with a focus on social and cultural issues. The chapter introduces the idea of cultural citizen inquiry as a method that may validate young heritage language learners’ search for identity, usually intertwined with heritage and culture, and also support them to engage critically with their everyday experiences

Alien Registration- Michalakos, Koula (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/31350/thumbnail.jp

Community-based interventions for language learning among refugees and migrants

This paper presents recent research projects carried out at The Open University UK that involved work with migrant learners. Across these projects the aim was to understand the use of mobile technologies, to create and evaluate a number of mobile applications for informal learning scenarios, and to design learning activities with an aim to support language acquisition. By drawing on a small exploratory study carried out in community settings with diaspora youth we reflect on technology deployed, methods used and lessons learnt with an aim to contribute to research agenda that could guide HCI research in refugee context