Michigan State University (Writing in Digital Environments Research Center)

This study seeks to understand facilitation styles and their outcomes in two distinct but representative museum environments. The first, Science Buzz at Science Museum of Minnesota, is a popular Web site identified by the field to be exemplary because of its educational value and its use of Web 2.0 functionality. The second is the more distributed use of social software at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina. The first uses learning platforms that are hosted internally, while the second is experimenting with building learning communities where people are already gathering on the Web, such as Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. Researchers will closely follow activity at each museum, using discourse analysis as their primary analytical approach with the goal of identifying clear, replicable facilitation styles and indicators of learning associated with those styles.