Leveraging Short-Lived Social Networks in Museums to Engage People in History Learning

The interactions enabled by the popular sites of the Web 2.0 are largely confined to the virtual world of the Internet, thus failing to engage people in relevant interactions with people, contents or resources in their physical environment. In this paper, we motivate the potential of automatically establishing sporadic social networks among people (acquaintances or strangers) who happen to be physically close to one another at a certain moment. We present the design of one platform intended to provide solutions from the lowest level of establishing ad-hoc connections among nearby mobile devices, up to the highest level of automatically identifying the most relevant pieces of information to deliver at any time. One specific scenario is discussed for museum environments, considering the possibility of engaging groups of people into immersive collective experiences to learn about major historical events.