user guide for educators
This guide is intended as a resource for educators such as senior high school teachers, postsecondary instructors or museum educational programmers and curators who wish to integrate “Collection Collective” into their existing curriculums. We made this user guide publicly available to allow our design methodologies to be transparent for the participants of “Collection Collective," as well.
Taking the form of a virtual art museum exhibit, “Collection Collective” is an online learning environment that serves as a thoughtful dedication to the notion of the object and the practice of personal collecting, where both the curators and visitors will collaborate to bring their intimate perspectives and a wider view of the world through engagement. The intended learners are mature adolescents and adult museum patrons. Through self-guided exploration of “Collection Collective” museum patrons will learn about distinctive themes of the personal collection such as The Evocative, The Ordinary, The Gleaned, and The Relic. High school and postsecondary educators, museum educational programmers, curators, and facilitators are welcome to consult this guide to engage their participants in a multifaceted approach to the discovery of objects and collections as units of meaning and self-identity.
This informal learning environment encourages peer learning through guided social engagement that consists of online discussions, the sharing of digital artifacts, and the creation, documentation and public display of personal collections. We intend for “Collection Collective” to inspire the appreciation of different perspectives and life experiences and to foster social culture and networked connection through creative practice. Similar to how each museum patron can produce a different interpretation of a painting, learners’ experiences with “Collection Collective” are uniquely based on their own identities and authentic way of life. Through a variety of multimodal content that relays researched information, historical contexts, activity prompts and rich documentation of existing collections, learners are compelled to create their own dedication to the space, may it be through text, image, audio, video, or other virtual means. Participatory-based new media is used to create a continuous and evolving interactive collection to communicate and see the world through the intimacy of personal objects.