Reading Notes: Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, Chapter 2

Reading Notes for "Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience", John H Falk, Chapter 2

Leisure

• Leisure becoming more central in last 10-30 years
• Leisure is connected to identity: pursue leisure to construct, situate, realize identity
• Satisfaction with leisure depends on the activity meeting expectations/motivations: not about "what" people do but "why" they do it. The success of the leisure activity depends on fulfilling the "why". This was defined as the "experiential approach" by Driver and Tocher. Driver defined 15 major motivational categories to describe why people engage in recreational activities

Research on Museum Motivations

• Describes several different studies
• Different motivations correspond to different learning outcomes

Learning in Museums

• For visitors museums are, at their core, places of leisure learning
• Learning in museums is about intrinsic identity building, not extrinsic performance goals
• We don't have good tools for measuring learning when learning is about identity rather than performance.

Identity-related visit motivations
1. Explorer
2. Facilitator
3. Experience seeker
4. Professional/Hobbyist
5. Recharger

• Visit motivations probably include a mix of these (not strictly pure)
• Education/learning is implicit in all 5 categories

My thoughts

• I like the 5 categories of identity-related visit motivations. I'm not sure I understand why this categorization is superior to other categorizations.
• I find 2 ideas in this chapter very compelling:
• 1. Learning is an inherent part of the museum experience. People go to museums expecting to learn something. Like people go to a restaurant expected to get full. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to make "Education" or "Learning" a motivation in and of itself.
• Lack of good tools for measuring learning when learning is about identity rather than performance. 
• How do you measure the identity-learning that occurs when someone already knows something, but the museum learning experience validates what they learned? 
• Or, how do you measure identity-learning when someone comes out of a museum feeling like they are more of a curious person (identify) but don't perform better on a pre- post- set of factual questions?

Reading Notes: Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, Chapter 1

Reading Notes for "Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience", John H Falk, Chapter 1

Old paradigm of what to focus on to assess learning in museums
1. Museum-focused (content, exhibits).
Implication A: frequent visitors are the ones who care the most and know the most about the museum's content
Implication B: visitors who have more prior knowledge in the content area will learn more from the museum

2. Visitor-focused (demographics, frequency, social arrangement)
Contention A: Demographics are not predictive. If race/ethnicity correlates with museum going, how do we know that is causal? Example, race may have different results, but it's due to more variation within a race than variation between races.
(My counter, greater variation is still useful to understand. It's still a difference based in race. How we interpret the difference is different.)
Contention B: Visit frequency is not a quality of the visitor, but rather an action that indicates something deeper
Contention C: Social arrangement - not the same as the actual social interaction of a visit

New model
Supersedes the Contextual Model of Learning
1. Seeks to develop a predictive model
2. Stop thinking about museum exhibits and content as fixed and stable designed to achieve singular outcomes - instead see as intellectual resources capable of being experienced and used in different ways
3. Visitors aren't defined by a permanent quality or attritube, but each is unique and capable of having different museum visit experiences (even within same person). Call this visitor's identity-related visit motivations.

My thoughts
Overall, agree with this. I really like the idea of fluidity in visitors at their personal level (a given visitor could "be" a different kind of visitor at various museum visits) as well as fluidity in content/exhibits (this seems to be getting more and more true in the current age of customization, DIY, life hacking, and instant personalization).

I'm interested (and maybe a bit skeptical) to see a truly predictive model. This chapter was vague and I'm looking for precision and crispness in a predictive model.