Continuous change in all spheres of our life seems to affect the ways in which people as individuals and collectivities approach, perceive and understand present and past realities. Both museums and Historical Education can no longer rely on certainties acquired through past experience, observations, studies and research, since new questions come to the fore. It is imperative to explore this changing reality in different sectors of life in order to understand museums' and Historical Education's location and role in this new transitional environment. The way we used to think of and understand museums and Historical Education and, for that matter, teaching, learning and research, needs to be reconsidered, re-analyzed and re-theorized, taking seriously into account the co-existence of both new and traditional assumptions, conceptions and pre-conceptions, ideas, processes and realities. The paper discusses the implications of the broad use of electronic technology in relation to history learning, especially within the museum environment, and notions of transitional space and transitional processes related to the virtual character of contemporary perceptions and representations of reality and historical sources. The discussion is especially based on observations related to the general broad public use of History, and especially of oral history, in the public sphere.
Historical Education; Museums; Electronic technology; Oral history