Venture to the interior -Virtual object lessons

The question of how to design and implement efficient remote learning environments gains a new quality in the light of extensive digital education projects such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. At the core of this consideration is not only the task of developing content for very different cultural settings but also the necessity to reflect the effects of learning processes that operate exclusively with digitally mediated content. This chapter outlines the design strategies of the project Venture to the Interior, an interactive experience that presents selected objects from the collections of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany, and displays them in a context reflecting the museum as an institution and the practices of collecting as knowledge constitution. The project investigates the role of objects as knowledge devices and the possibilities for a translation of the didactic effects of experiential learning into virtual environments.