Defining and Customizing Tagmemic Interaction for Historic House Museum Websites: A Study of Effective Learning Design for Museum Educators

Educational multimedia tools that are marketed most successfully usually are described as "interactive" learning resources. The word interactive broadly suggests a host of positive learning experiences - student-driven inquiry, audio-visual support of ideas, and critical thinking or decision-making opportunities. However, the term interactive often is used loosely, and begs for a more concrete definition. This study defines multimedia interactivity as a give-and-take relationship between a technology tool and its human user. Technology itself is not interactive, but technology can be designed and developed to enhance an interactive experience. This study looks at the problem of defining such a nebulous term, particularly within the context of museum learning environments. A review of literature from 1991 to the present reveals four common characteristics that interactive environments tend to share: 1) face-to-face communication, 2) productive decision-making opportunities, 3) meaningful text, image, and audio juxtaposition, and 4) language, skill level, and interest accessibility. The four characteristics are examined and evaluated through interviews with professionals in a variety of multimedia-related fields ranging from museum education to information technology. Most interview respondents felt that successfully interactive websites primarily provide productive decision-making opportunities, but many respondents also indicated that true interactivity is the user's creation of something new from the content provided. The study also examines how the four characteristics manifest themselves in current websites, distinguishing between informational and interactive websites. The conclusion of the study correlates interactivity theory with Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike's Tagmemics theory by challenging educators to consider the countless variables of human behavior that inevitably affect both language and learning. Just as Young, Becker, and Pike claim that categorizing language into finite units such as the phoneme and the morpheme limits our understanding of language development, so would the categorization of interactive learning into finite technology elements thwart the true organic nature of interactivity. To make the study more practical for museum educators, the revised interactivity theory is applied to one specific learning environment - a historic house museum website. The study recommends design characteristics for a proposed historic house website that foster interactive relationships between technology and the user, while challenging the user to participate in creating his or her own historic documentation by applying the website content to modern situations.