New media technologies to enhance learning and audience engagement in cultural institutions

Abstract

New media technologies have drastically changed most aspects of our daily lives in ashort time span. They have become ubiquitous in the workspace, they have made their wayto our homes and remarkably changed the ways by which knowledge is disseminated. Thegrowing pervasiveness of those technologies has led to fundamental transformations incultural institutions’ organisational factors on a global scale (Bearman and Geber 2008,387). New media technologies have also contributed to changing educational institutionson a managerial level and on a pedagogical level; they have paved the way for thedigitalisation of the classroom and for more interactive ways of learning, some of whoseconcepts have been implemented in cultural institutions for the dissemination ofknowledge.In this internship report, we will particularly drive our attention towards the use ofnew media technologies in cultural institutions and to the correlation between thosetechnologies, audience engagement and learning experience enhancement within culturalinstitutions.It is our belief that such technologies have the potential to enhance culturalinstitutions’ educational programs, strengthen audience engagement, and create strongerand more genuine links between traditional institutions and the audience. In this report, wewill qualitatively and critically shed light on how new media technologies havefundamentally contributed to changing audience engagement and ways of learning withinthe cultural institution. We will put the highlight on the institutional shifts and extensionsthat new media technologies gave rise to. Then, we will drive our attention towards theeducational possibilities that those technologies have led to, we will see how new mediatechnologies can contribute to improving engagement and learning for audiences withdisabilities, and we will, finally, shed light on the experiential metamorphoses that newmedia technologies have induced within cultural institutions. We will use our case study,which is a Viennese augmented reality application named Artivive, in order strengthen ouranalyses and respond to our research question.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Luísa Santos (Supervisor)