It is interesting to speculate on how this could be extended by allowing many more people to participate remotely in the children ' s learning by being ' alongside ' them in the online world. These people could be teachers, experts or any community members who could enrich the experience, just as a guided tour can involve a variety of people. The web is already allowing people to be threaded into many evolving conversations, and this could be extended into participating in the children's interactive explorations.
Perhaps in the future a museum will be a sort of control room for a variety of tours in the neighbourhood from which people could be connected to a wide variety of on-location experiences. A geology expert could 'drop in ' on a child's tour and look at the same feature as they are seeing and answer their question in the moment Or a community member who had provided a particular story might come on line for some conversation. Museums and libraries are likely to think of their job as becoming an active, and interactive, curator of their wider physical setting rather than just a concern with what is inside the walls.