museumsandtheweb.com - education

MoMA Courses Online

colleen_brogan — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:52:48 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

digital learning

Keywords:

online courses

Keywords:

the museum of modern art

Abstract:

The first two MoMA Courses Online were demonstrated at MW2011 after the first two semesters of courses and limited research and evaluations competed: for MW2012, members of the Digital Learning team at MoMA will report on the evaluation and findings from the first year and a half of MoMA Courses Online, plus introduce two new online courses, an 8-week studio course on collage called "Experimenting with Collage", and the part two to the art history survey, "Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945-1989" which will launch with the first semester of students in February 2012. MoMA Digital Learning will report on the production of the courses, introduce the course environment, and talk about lessons learned in digital marketing, online pedagogy, and successful online community management.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations III

Site:

http://moma.org/coursesonline

Authors:

Colleen Brogan

MyBatMitzvahStory and Living the Legacy

pdash — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:26:40 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

cultural education

Keywords:

community

Keywords:

Media

Keywords:

interactivity

Abstract:

We have recently launched a new site called MyBatMitzvahStory.org which is part of the Jewish Women’s Archive education program. The site targets girls who are of bat mitzvah age (11-13) and helps them explore and express their emerging identities as Jewish women. We are particularly excited about the interactive features of the site, such as quizzes that help related girls to other “Cool Jewish Women,” a journal to record their thoughts and feelings, and sections for describing their personal heroes and imagining what their future life as a Jewish woman will be. The site also includes a presentation tool which allows users to create slideshows using media either provided by JWA, available on YouTube, or uploaded by the user herself. MyBatMitzvahStory is a way to expand JWA’s audience to a new age group and provides an avenue for these girls to connect to the Jewish community, their heritage, and the women they are becoming. It also is a step towards thinking of our website not as solely content to be delivered to the user, but a way for the user to deliver and create her own content and story.

In conjunction with MyBatMitzvahStory, we would also like to demonstrate a section of jwa.org called “Living the Legacy” (http://jwa.org/livingthelegacy), which is targeted towards Jewish Educators. It is a new online curriculum that uses primary sources to explore the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights and Labor Movements. Educators working in both formal and informal settings can use the materials in their entirety or choose individual lessons to teach.

Living the Legacy pushes the envelope in terms of providing teachers with an intuitive set of tools to explore, edit, and build lesson plans incorporating some, or all, of the JWA-provided materials, while also including the teacher’s own materials. The goal was to create a media-rich website with a wealth of primary sources from the archive that works with the teacher, while also suggesting a variety of ways to approach each section, rather than force the teacher to use our materials our way, and rather than limit the teacher to materials from our site only.

Like “MyBatMitzvahStory.org,” the “Living the Legacy” curriculum emphasizes providing core tools and primary resources without limiting teachers or students to what happens to be available from our site only. It is our first step into a broader semantic web.

We are very excited about both of these new programs at JWA, and believe they are a step forward for JWA, Jewish education, and online archives in general.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations I

Site:

http://mybatmitzvahstory.org

Authors:

Patrick Dash

Ari Davidow

Beyond Cool: Making Mobile Augmented Reality Work for Museum Education

smannion — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 06:24:31 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Beyond Cool: Making Mobile Augmented Reality Work for Museum Education

Keywords:

digital learning

Keywords:

mobile devices

Keywords:

research

Keywords:

study

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

teenagers

Abstract:

***PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN INDIVIDUAL PAPER PROPOSAL, NOT A DEMONSTRATION.

In June 2011, more than a year of intensive experimentation with Augmented Reality at The British Museum culminated in a large-scale education project with 700 teenagers. This paper presents results of quantitative and observational research on the project focusing especially on how AR impacts learning and the use of tablets in museum galleries. It explores the challenges of implementing the two main styles of mobile AR (marker-based and location-based) in gallery environments with low lighting, visitor overcrowding and without wireless networks. The aim is to share our experience of implementing AR applications for children and families within the constraints faced by nearly all museum education departments: small budgets, lack of staff resources, technical expertise and technical infrastructure.

The British Museum’s digital learning team launched its first mobile AR application in November 2010. Despite a tiny budget and only three weeks development time, the Passport to the Afterlife (http://bit.ly/dLSwtH) activity successfully introduced marker-based AR into museum galleries. It revealed crucial insights about the appropriate use of AR for children, the potential of mobile AR for kinesthetic learning and the importance of blending AR interaction with analog techniques to ensure a rewarding learning experience. Three more AR projects built on this initial experience.

The most recent and ambitious is the Gallery Explorer (http://vimeo.com/25782400), a location-based AR game that runs across five different galleries and features 35 carefully selected museum objects. It runs on Samsung Galaxy 7” Tablets which are shared by students age 14-15 working in groups of 5-6. This project provided the opportunity for formal evaluation (http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/91923) of how groups work together with tablet-sized mobile devices, what specifically AR adds to students’ experience of the gallery and how to design a compelling AR interface.

During the past 12-18 months, most museum use of AR was for one-off events or temporary installations for adult visitors. While incredibly exciting, these applications were not designed to run in the day to day context of museum education, with its continuous and demanding stream of children, teachers and parents. This paper gets down to the nitty gritty of how AR’s game-like interaction can be integrated into proven and sustainable models for gallery learning activities and become a core element of digital education programs in museums.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

NextGen Mobile Applied

Site:

http://vimeo.com/25782400

Authors:

Shelley Mannion

Evaluating Modern Teachers Online and MoMA’s New Teaching and Learning Pilot Site

bethrharris — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:43:55 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

teachers

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

learning resources

Abstract:

In 2006, Modern Teachers Online was built as a repository for MoMA’s printed teacher guides. Since then, video has become a powerful educational tool for both students and informal learners. In addition, Web 2.0 and RSS have led to the disaggregation of materials - things that were once bundled together are now offered piecemeal (think: songs on iTunes instead of whole albums). Also, since everyone can now publish to the web, teachers are confronted with a wealth of resources for learning materials and lesson plans (Lesson Planet, TeachersPayTeachers.com, etc.).

In light of these developments, in 2010, the education department began a process of rethinking the content and structure of our teacher resources. We imagined re-purposing the teacher materials to make them useful for informal learners, disaggregating them, and combining them with other, existing resources on MoMA.org. Lastly, we imagined a site that was not segregated within the education section of the website. We began by surveying the existing research and did two days of action research with both teachers and informal learners to try out our ideas.

In the Fall of 2010, we created a pilot site (http://education.moma.org/moma/learningresources/) in response to our findings. We used Haiku, the Learning Management System we use for delivering our online courses. The site, on Abstract Expressionism, re-purposed materials from an existing teacher guide, from the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition sub-site (moma.org/abex), and from the in-gallery experience of the exhibition (audio-tours). However, it also incorporated new materials designed specifically for teachers, including slideshows, Powerpoints, worksheets, teaching tips, and discussion questions as well as existing content from Modern Teacher Online.

Our demonstration at Museums and the Web will include both the results of our research and the pilot site that we built in response to our findings.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstrations III

Site:

http://education.moma.org/moma/learningresources

Authors:

Beth Harris

Lisa Mazzola

Colleen Brogan

DocsTeach

SIsaacs — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:21:14 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

history

Keywords:

lessons

Keywords:

educational interactives

Abstract:

The U.S. National Archives’ new website DocsTeach.org invites teachers to bring history to life for their students and gives them a powerful set of tools that they can use to create rich, interactive online learning activities. From the home page, teachers can search for activities ready to use in the classroom, begin to explore the more than 3,500+ documents featured from the holdings of the National Archives, or even create their own fun and engaging activities.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstrations II

Site:

http://docsteach.org

Authors:

Suzanne Isaacs

Stephanie Greenhut

From Knowledge to Narrative – to Systems? At the junction of game design and museum education

davidschaller — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:43:57 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

From Knowledge to Narrative – to Systems? Games, Rules and Meaning-making

Keywords:

games

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

design

Keywords:

learning

Keywords:

constructivism

Keywords:

narrative

Abstract:

Laura Robert's landmark book "From Knowledge to Narrative" (Roberts, 1997) analyzed a paradigm shift in museum exhibition in the late 20th century as educators moved museums from traditional methods of knowledge transmission to constructivist interpretive methods such as narrative. Today, museum educators wishing to adopt game-based learning methods face a similar challenge: to move from now-familiar narrative methods to a systems-based approach. Games are, at heart, a set of rules that define player choices and subsequent consequences. Applying a strong narrative to a game usually results in neither a good story nor a good game. Instead, we must learn to think like game and system designers, finding the rules intrinsic to our content.

In some ways, this shift from narrative to systems is less formidable than was the shift from knowledge transmission, since both narrative and systems are rooted in constructivism, the notion that learning is, as Hein (1998) says, “is not a simple addition of items into some sort of mental data bank but a transformation of schemas in which the learner plays an active role and which involves making sense out of a range of phenomena.” Games, one could argue, are even more constructivist than narratives, since the player's role is by definition active, evaluating various phenomena to inform successful tactics to win the game.

Nevertheless, this shift from narrative to systems is often difficult for museum educators, particularly art and history educators schooled in the humanities rather than science. Exhibits and education materials generally explore the idiosyncrancies of a given topic, whether they be the expressive and interpretive aspects of an artwork or the narrative arc of an historical event. The meaning to be made from this approach is powerful, often pulling us back in even when we struggle toward a systems approach. For example, inspired by game designer Sid Meier's fabled definition of a good game as "a series of interesting choices," we might use a "choose your own adventure" branching story design. This approach appears to serve both the idiosyncratic arc of an historical narrative while providing the meaningful choices so central to a game. In practice, though, this approach serves both the history and the gameplay poorly, as it forces players into increasingly less-meaningful choices simply to keep the number of story branches manageable.

Instead, we must adopt a true rules-based design, digging into our content to find even a few rules inherent in the subject matter that can then define the gameplay. This paper will explore this challenge, drawing on both game design theory (core dynamics, rules, actions, skills, chance) and published commercial and non-profit games to show how the heterogeneous realworld content of museums can indeed be turned into exciting and meaningful learning games.

References:

Hein, G. (1998). Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge.
Roberts, L. (1997). From Knowledge to Narrative. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Games

Authors:

Dave Schaller

Gaming the museum

dannybirchall — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:55:41 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Gaming the museum

Keywords:

gaming

Keywords:

interaction

Keywords:

new audiences

Keywords:

collections

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

exploration

Abstract:

Why, with the vast resources, and fundamental human subjects at our disposal, have museums failed to make more than a handful of really compelling games? Are we too wedded to the idea that games must be educational? Do we lack the in-house skills to make subject matter and game engines gel, or are we simply trying to enter an overcrowded marketplace with too few resources? Should we leave making games to the professionals?

At Wellcome Collection, we are beginning the process of making games for our website that put compelling gameplay at the centre of the experience, building our subject matter and resources around that experience. Games have their own logics and structure, and there's no reason these should be subjugated to narrow educational aims any more than the physical layout of the museum should determine the information architecture of our websites. The playful and exploratory impulses that draw gamers towards great games are still largely untapped as a means of engagement.

Using the mini-workshop format, we will present our progress to date and open up a discussion of other museums' experience, sharing our ideas and understanding of games. We will use simple exercises to look at matching our available resources (narratives, photography, object databases) to modes of gameplay, as well as investigating reusable game engines, game syndication, and building enthusiasm for games inside the organisation.

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Mini-Workshop on Games: I

Authors:

Martha Henson

Danny Birchall

ArtPad: Here's the collection -- did we make a connection?

jtrant — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:01:03 +0000

Kjorlien, M. (2008). ArtPad: Here's the collection -- did we make a connection?. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2008. Proceedings.

Innovate: journal of online education

jtrant — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:54:18 +0000

James L. Morrison,(ed.) (2004). Innovate: journal of online education.

Le Musée Virtuel à l'Épreuve de l'Enseignement et la Recherche en Histoire de l'Art

jtrant — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:27:59 +0000

Welger-Barboza, C. (2003). Le Musée Virtuel à l'Épreuve de l'Enseignement et la Recherche en Histoire de l'Art. (Perrot, Xavier (d. 2007), Ed.).International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting: Proceedings from ichim03.

Art Museum Web Sites: From Information Medium to Learning Medium

jtrant — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:59:43 +0000

Desmarteau, M. (2003). Art Museum Web Sites: From Information Medium to Learning Medium. (David Bearman, Trant, Jennifer, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2003: Proceedings.

Curating for Broadband

jtrant — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:57:39 +0000

Blyth, T. (2005). Curating for Broadband. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings.