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Heritage Meets Social Media: Designing a Virtual Museum Space for Young People

Abstract This research was conducted as part of a project designed to offer guidance on the development of a youth oriented online space for a popular Canadian museum of heritage and immigration. This space would allow young people to learn about heritage, ethnicity, and cultural identity, and, ideally, aid in the development of a positive ethnic identity. This current paper reports on literature-based research exploring three key areas: how young people currently use and engage with technology and digital media, practices for pursuing informal learning online, and the influence on and use of virtual spaces for identity formation. We explored both theoretical and empirical literature, and concluded that to engage youth such a site must both allow for and encourage participation, communication, and collaboration. Social media sites are popular with youth and if they support socio-cultural understandings of learning and identity formation, these sites also have the potential to serve as an excellent model for the design of virtual museum spaces.