Le Web 2.0 et les Musées des Sciences: Quel Accès à la Culture Scientifique?

In a context of increase in content and actors on the Internet, museum’s websites are publishing resources for diffusion of arts and sciences, but also for their promotion and for communication. The option to limit interactivity is taken to provide verified data, included in a slow temporality compared to the temporality of the Internet and more recently of the web 2.0, but this is made without debate in most cases. On the websites which offer web 2.0’s services, on platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, blogs and wikis, the contents of Internet users are spreading in altruistic or fun dynamics. In response to the flood of these applications, scientific museums are wondering about ways to capture these new forms of publication and create spaces to accommodate the contributions of Internet users, amateurs and laymen. As they invite them to participate, they must tolerate productions without scientific rigor, to open new access to science and increase the outreach of scientific culture. Do These new uses lead museums to conceive their mission of mediation to the scientific and technological culture in a new way on the Web? With the Web 2.0, is it possible for the museum institution to be satisfied with a unidirectional model of knowledge disseminated by specialists to a receiving public ? Or must it devise new models of hypermediation to a participant public? As an authoritative broadcaster of legitimated content, does the museum face a risk in opening participatory spaces for contributions by laymen Internet users? Can we consider these spaces as tools allowing forms of learning in an informal context? On the basis of socio-constructivist theories, we will present an analysis of a corpus composed of national and international websites of museums which are on the way to appropriate Web 2.0 applications, and of non-institutional platforms seizing museum subjects, in order to show different dynamics of actors, and to display contributive Internet as a vehicle for developing scientific culture and for informal learning.