Discovernet©: Building an Education Gateway

Australian Museums and Galleries OnLine (AMOL) recently launched DiscovernetO, a learning gateway to Australian cultural institutions and the quality educational resources they produce. Research for the development of Discovenlet0 showed that while children under the age of 14 used the Internet regularly, few online education products were designed specifically for this younger age group. The interface and schema for DiscovernetO have been greatly influenced by the idea that young children are active users of the Internet and a portal such as Discovernet0 has enormous potential to promote museums and museum objects as places and tools of learning and discove~y. DiscovernctO comprises four sections: an interactive game called Make your own exhibition that uses real museum objects to introduce children to the curatorial process; a national database of museum education resources called Study Booster that incorporates specialist education metadata; a museum guide for students and teachers; and an Australiur~ Tales section that presents historical or social contextualisation of the museum objects in AMOL's distributed national database, tied to curriculum objectives. This paper looks at the advantages of the gateway model for museums' educational content on the web and the issues encountered in the building of DiscovernetO, including the importance of active learning strategies in online education and the applicatio~~ of specialist education metadata. DiscovernetO was launched in conjunction with a web cast from a megafauna fossil dig in the Australian