Virtual Museums

Virtual museums are very beneficial to educators. From a multicultural standpoint, they bring far exhibits close to home. Virtual museums have the ability to keep exhibits on display without tine limitations or spacial constraints.
Navigating through a virtual tour of any museum allows the user to replay/reread the information about the display. Unless you are in a guided group, when exploring an actual museum you are often on your own. Virtual museum tours supply supplementary information such as text hyperlinks, quicktime movies, and shockwave games. These are likely to enhance the lesson and reinforce what was just learned.
If we, as educators, can incorporate fun into learning, we are likely to have more motivated students who are actively involved. This will likely increase retention. Virtual museums can offer so much to enhance our lessons and entice our students to want to learn more.
I found this humorous quote from John Naughton (1998) in a London newspaper, The Observer.
"The great thing about virtual museums is that they exist only in cyberspace and as such lack these features: leaky roofs, queues of customers with smelly socks, crocodiles of unspeakable children at half term, trade unions, maternity leave, and staffs which make actual museums difficult to administer. Virtual museums are like ideal universities: all those libraries and research labs, and not an undergraduate in sight."