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The 21st Century Museum

Module description

This module introduces you to recent museum practices and models. You will be offered the opportunity to explore a range of emergent practices spanning from education, digital, preservation, marketing and curation. You will evaluate these practices through methodologies and theories drawn from Museum Studies, Digital Humanities, Performance Studies, Art, New Media, and Visual Culture. You will also think about ways in which museums structure learning and education activities. You will explore key concepts and practices: interaction and participation; augmented and virtual reality; gameful design; community; experience economy and globalisation; archive and documentation; ecological practice; mobile and free learning. You will also learn about how museums operate as organisations; how they design and market their relationships to visitors, both in the museum and online; how they use a range of technologies and learning strategies to reach out to different groups; and how they produce novel forms of aesthetic and economic value. The module requires no prior knowledge or skills in museum studies and is open to anyone with an interest in the current and future developments of the museums. It may be of particular interest of those students who are considering a career in the museum sector.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module aims to introduce you to the 21st century museum to foster a theoretical and practical understanding of a range of emergent museological practices. Through a combination of in-class discussion, readings, and lectures, as well as first-hand engagement with digital materials and social media, you will develop an understanding of this important and burgeoning field. Viewings and associated readings will exercise your ability to engage in sophisticated analyses and enable you to think about how ideas and concepts relate to and are framed by material practices.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Interpret recent developments in museum practice in relation to theory drawn from relevant texts.
• 2. Critically evaluate the dominant concepts, methods and debates informing recent developments in museum practice.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Demonstrate an ability to interrelate texts, artworks, heritage, and discourses specific to a range of disciplines with issues in the wider context of museum practice
• 4. Demonstrate an ability to understand and analyse theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to contexts where they may be encountered in practice.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Through essay writing, demonstrate a basic capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 6. Through research for the essay, demonstrate basic proficiency in research and bibliographical skills, information retrieval, analysis and sharing.

Syllabus plan

The module will consist of a series of lectures and seminars, including first-hand engagement with works of art, heritage and museological practices.

Syllabus (indicative):

• Introduction to the course: the pre-history of the 21 the century museum
• Section 1: The interactive, participatory and augmented museum
• Section 2: The museum on the web and the distributed museum
• Section 3: The turn to performance, the gameful and personalized museum
• Conclusion to the course: learning, preservation and curation in the future museum

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Bishop, C. (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel and MIT Press.
• Frieling, R. et al (2009) The Art of Participation, London and New York, and San Francisco: Thames and Hudson and SFMOMA.
• Giannachi, G. (2016) Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
• Graham, B. and Cook, S. (2010) Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media, Cambridge, MA:
• MIT Press.
• Parry, R. (2007) Re-coding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, London and New York: Routledge.
• Parry, R. (2010) Museums in a Digital Age, London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Simon, N. (2010) The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0. http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=11211 

Key words search

Interactive Museum; Digital Humanities; Art History; Visual Culture; Participatory Museum; Gameful design; Virtual and Mixed Reality; Environmental museum; Digital Curation; Performance; Globalisation; Community