Use of Technology

The use of technology appears in many ways, for example multimedia tours in museums, interactive kiosks, simulation and virtual reality tours, virtual museums and Access to collections and databases online.

Education

The combination of education and technology has been considered the main key to human progress. Education feeds technology, which in turn forms the basis for education. It is therefore not surprising that to be “developed” is to have had education based on western knowledge, science and technology. This is today considered progress.

Education via Virtual environments (E-learning) has become a major trend among Universities and several Educational environments; as it presents better interaction between students and teachers in a productive way virtually online engaging in hands-on constructivist learning. It could be thought of as a Content Management system of the huge contents that are stored and interacted with on a regular basis.

Virtual Environments are a new tool that can be adopted to enhance real-time online communication and collaboration and to construct engaging online activities (Sulcic, 2009). The adoption of e-learning within the UK HE sector was influenced by several drivers and resulted in the increasing adoption of VLEs within the institutions. A range of issues at the institutional and individual academic level are defined in order to be considered and addressed when designing and implementing a VLE with in an HE institution (O’ Donoghue, 2009).

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) s are integrated environments that focus on on-line learning and teaching interactions by supplying tools and functionality to facilitate their management and aggregate different resources and information added by instructors displaying them in a structured manner to assist learners as well as smooth the progress of communication between learners and instructors (Tantall, 2007).

The tools and functionalities vary from VLE to VLE; some VLEs have been produced by commercial companies such as “Blackboard”, others are open-source as Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment)Ajlan, Zedan, 2008). Second Life is one of the well known VLEs as well it is a free 3D virtual world developed in 2003 by Philip Rosedale, it is a Computer - based environment where real people, represented by an avatar can socialize, connect, work, play, create and more importantly learn and educate (Nair, 2010).

Multimedia in museums and public environments

The international council of museums define Museums as a “non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment” They are considered as public educational institutes and users could be connected through multimedia. The Competitive and political environment is energising a drive toward new forms of marketing and educational activity. (Kendal, 2010) Second Life is one of the great examples museums can benefit from since it is a 3D immersive virtual environment.


References
Kendal, M. (2010, May). Multimedia Museums and public Environments.
Maureen Kendal, M. G. (2010). Business process and practice - Creative Industries.
Nair, V. (2010, May). Using VLE technology in education and outside educational environment. Retrieved 2010, from http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk
Derar, L. (2011, Jan). Creative Indusries
Sulčič, Alja (2009). Virtual worlds in Education and Moodle.
O’ Donoghue, John (2009). Technology Supported Learning and Teaching. Information Science Publishing, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Tantall, A. (2007). Encyclopaedia of Portal Technologies and Applications. Information Science Reference.
Effective use of VLEs - http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk
Ajlan Al-Ajlan, Hussein Zedan (2008). Why Moodle. IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.