Museums, multimedia and history education

The development of digital technologies, particularly multimedia, has been a site of intense activity for museums over the past decade or so. While the impact of multimedia on museums and museum interpretation has been widely debated, their use in museum education programmes — those designed against specified curriculum outcomes — has received less critical attention. Multimedia have radically altered relationships between education authorities and museums, teachers and learners, the physical museum and the virtual. The Australian National Inquiry into School History, which reported in 2000, called for the increased use of the resources of museums and other cultural heritage institutions in the teaching of school history, particularly through online programmes. While this call requires renewed consideration of the distinctiveness of the museum learning environment, the Inquiry’s conceptualisation of historical literacy and the pedagogical uses of new communication technologies can assist the work of museums in their response to these contested domains.