Image 1. Casts of original sculptures from Parthenon - guided tour for 5th grade of elementary schoool Mediated Heritage Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts: Antiquity CyberEd G. Zlodi * , Ž. Miklošević * * Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb/ Department of Information and Communication Science, Zagreb, Croatia E-mail: gzlodi@ffzg.hr, zmiklose@ffzg.hr This article explores the ways a physical educational resource is transformed by ICT into a virtual learning material on the example of Ancient Greek sculptures at Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The sculptures, acquired as casts from the originals in the British Museum and Louvre, serve as a learning resource in teaching museum study courses, while the results of this formal education provide a new learning material for an online environment. The theoretical framework is based on Laurillard’s classification of educational media that facilitate participative learning in formal education and consequently in informal online heritage education. I. INTRODUCTION Cultural institutions, including museums have in the past several decades been oriented to users and the ways users themselves construct meaning communicated through heritage objects and sites. This trend corresponds well with contemporary educational theories, which replace transmissive approach in which the body of knowledge is conveyed to learners, with the approach that gives the central importance in the learner and his ways of constructing knowledge. In other words, learner becomes more important than the body of knowledge. A. Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Theories of Learning – new media-enhanced education Priority is given primarily to individual experience and social context in which learning takes place. Self- exploration, participation, experience, social interaction, personalization are only some of the terms which comprise contemporary view on learning in museums and heritage sector and have been used in literature dealing with informal learning, in museums and in general [1], [2] [3], [4], [5]. Presented cultural heritage exerts influence on users and their cognitive and perceptual characteristics change only if they come from the familiar cultural and social contexts and have previously known experiences related to the topic [6]. Furthermore, museums and interpretation centres are expected to provide users with opportunity to establish personal links with heritage items, topics and experiences, to enable participation in activities which go beyond mere observation, and finally, offer possibility of sharing experiences and opinions of people belonging to certain groups. As one of the currently most used concept in heritage sector which is heavily oriented to communication, heritage interpretation has developed in the last thirty years, and especially with the introduction of the internet, into functional framework. Online heritage interpretation started with web pages that resemble an electronic brochure, end continued with the pages whose content is more of a digital database of museum objects, which turned into complex sites offering information related to different heritage contexts and preferences of online users instead of exclusively to museum objects [7], [8]. B. Museum Object in the Virtual Environment The influence of new media on heritage or museum objects can be seen, on the one hand, as a threat to professionally created knowledge, and on the other hand as an opportunity to broaden the impact heritage can have on people if it becomes more accessible, both in terms of space and time, which is somewhat the internet provides, and in terms of understanding which can be achieved by inclusion of different contexts and perspectives on heritage. The principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding [9] enable limitless copying, appropriation and modification of digital heritage objects by a network of wide varieties and groups of users. Digital objects are qualitatively and materially different from their “physical” counterparts. While the physical objects are stabile entities in space and time,