THE COMMON AND INTERDISCIPLINARY ITINERARIES OF THE ITALIAN UNIVERSITY MUSEUMS NETWORK: A CHALLENGE FOR SHARING SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION

The network of the Italian University Museums, constituted among fifty museums, fourteen collections and seven Botanical Gardens of twelve Universities through an agreement program approved and financed by the Ministry of the University and Research, is working to create educational paths into interdisciplinary and common itineraries about four themes: stories, stories of the scientific instruments, landscape, environment. A bilingual web portal still in progress, stopping the disjointness and the variety of their current presence on the web, will promote a connection between different kind of audience as well as students of different levels of schools, including University students. In particular will offer to the schools an educational tool so as let young students approach to the big topics of science, becoming a means of knowledge and scientific communication. The use of the digital technologies, characterized by a good usability and accessibility level, allows to involve a lot of different kind of objects and collections to realize the educational paths in the most relevant scientific disciplines represented by the collections of the museums : anatomy, chemistry, physics, botany, mineralogy, paleontology, zoology. Digital technologies and the use of social network facilitate many kinds of collaboration among museums, teachers and students, between different institutions and among learners themselves, and also facilitate customization: by doing this the learning potential of a versatile and mobile information source, that is under the control of the learner, is very big.