Title: Creating online collaborative environments for museums: a case study of a museum wiki

Authors: Alison Hsiang-Yi Liu; Jonathan P. Bowen

Addresses: Department of Art Education National Taiwan Normal University, No. 19, Da-Tong West Road, Taoyuan City, Taiwan. ' Faculty of Business, London South Bank University, Borough Road, London, SE1 0AA, UK

Abstract: Museums have been increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technology to reach and interact with their visitors. Some have experimented with wikis to allow both curators and visitors to provide complementary information about objects in the museum. An example of this is the Object Wiki from the Science Museum in London. Little has been done to study these interactions in an academic framework. In the field of knowledge management, the concept of |communities of practice| has been posited as a suitable structure in which to study how knowledge is developed within a community with a common interest in a particular domain, using a sociological approach. Previously this has been used in investigating the management of knowledge within business organisations, teachers| professional development, and online e-learning communities. The authors apply this approach to a museum-based wiki to assess its applicability for such an endeavour.

Keywords: knowledge management; collaborative learning; communities of practice; CoP; museum wikis; online communities; virtual communities; web based communities; museums; web 2.0.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2011.042988

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2011 Vol.7 No.4, pp.407 - 428

Published online: 11 Jan 2015 *

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