Applying Onlilne Communities in Museums: Strategies Analysis

[[abstract]]Online applications associated with Web 2.0 have in recent years become part of mainstream museum practice, through which communication with the general public has since embraced a far more user-centered approach than before. As a key concept of this approach, the online community, through social media, has increasingly been adopted by museums with the aim of facilitating interactive dialogues and collaborative participation. In the field of museum education, creating online communities signifies that people are provided with a platform where they can be engaged in knowledge production together with the museum, and therefore has a great potential to foster their loyalties and a higher level of visitor involvement. This dissertation investigates strategies for creating online communities in the context of museum education. Through case studies, the author has selected five online communities of five museums in London to conduct participatory observation over 12 months. Data collection comprises both online and on-site undertakings. With the former, the author recorded a series of field notes from the five community sites on a daily basis using virtual ethnography as a methodology. With the latter, the author visited the gallery spaces of the five museums where she took part in related programs and exhibitions, and organized interviews with the community coordinators of the five cases. The theoretical framework applied to examine the five cases in this study is Community of Practice (CoP), a social theory of learning. The author carefully compared the five cases through CoP’s three fundamental elements and seven design principles, and discovered how their conformity with this framework reflects and impacts on the overall performance of the online communities. An analysis is followed from the perspective of museum education, to present how each case, as a community of practice, embodies the practical aspects of meaning construction, audience research, and the connection between online and on-site activities. On close examination throughout the study, this dissertation concludes with the best example of CoP, from which a scheme of feasible strategies is formulated, that could be used by museums and cultural institutions.