Media experience: learning is fun!

Last Saturday my wife Laurence, my son Midas and I visited the Media Experience. It is a museum in Hilversum (NL) where you experience the world of TV and radio. More than 700,000 hours of television series, radio shows and movies are opened to the public. Not just in an ordinary way but they created a real interactive and involving experience.



You can create your login account from home. When you enter the building you need a ring with a chip. That ring holds your personal data like your name and date of birth. The last one is needed to offer you the right television shows. And at that moment I realized that this is a powerful concept. A conversation between people from the same age often turns into a talk about TV-series. “Do your remember XXX, what year was that exactly….”. Sharing memories is a strong way of connecting with people. Even at the museum people started to talk to each other about their shared memories. At a lot of places you had to touch a screen with your ring and automatically the TV-series of your time was showed.



It was not only about watching but also about creating new content. Every visitor was able to try to do a screen-test, to edit film and to set up the best light arrangements. You could even tag the favorite parts of multimedia your created during the experience and download them from the site when you are home again!

A couple of things came up into my mind:

1. it is all about experiences (you are only learning when something moves you);
   
2. story-telling is a strong memory buster;
   
3. images are very strongly related to emotions;
   
4. interactivity is something natural;
   
5. creating content is great (and sharing also);
   
6. learning without realizing you are learning is easy.
   

Interested: visit the Dutch website or the limited English website.