Virtual Museums, Cultural Heritage Education and 21st Century skills

This paper puts forward the idea that Virtual Museums (VMs), if adopted in an instructional perspective, can effectively contribute to re-shape Cultural Heritage Education and can also contribute to sustain the new, multifaceted vision of "education" emerging in the 21st Century. VMs are significant examples of how cutting the edge ICT technologies can be embedded into applications oriented to knowledge raising and more specifically to learning. A wide variety of VMs exist, which are different not only as to the contents but also as to structure, specific objectives addressed, underpinning implementation techniques, presentation methods and interaction approaches adopted. Nowadays the educational potential of VMs is widely acknowledged although their actual use for educational purposes is still very limited (at least in formal educational contexts). This is what emerges from a wide-range survey conducted by the authors among Italian teachers and students: it depicts a situation where the adoption of VMs as educational tools in schools is still infrequent and not fully integrated in the standard educational practice although both the teachers and the students are confident in the potential of these means to sustain innovative, in-depth and effective learning experiences. In the paper, instead, we aim at stimulating the deployment of VMs in schools by also arguing that they, besides addressing effectively cultural heritage education, could also contribute to sustain and develop some of the "transversal" 21st Century skills: those referred to as "social, cultural skills and citizenship" and also, to some extent, those regarding communication, collaboration, digital literacy and creativity