This came to me via a K-12 listserv I subscribe to.  I think, in light of past
discussions of virtual museums, members of Museum-L will find this of interest.
As a museum educator, I found it insightful and inspiring.  Now, if we can just
connect museum professionals with schools who are engaged in creating virtual
museums maybe we will have a dynamic link!
 
Lisa Falk
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Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:29:09 EST
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Subject: FNO95JAN VIRTUAL MUSEUMS
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Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 11:53:00 -0800 (PST)
From: "McKenzie, Jamie" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: FNO95JAN VIRTUAL MUSEUMS
Encoding: 492 TEXT
 
>From Now On
 
A Monthly Electronic Commentary
on Educational Technology Issues
 
Vol 5. . . No 5 . . . January, 1995
Editor: Jamieson McKenzie, Ed.D.
Network 609
424 14th Street - Suite 202
Bellingham, WA 98225
Telephone 206-647-8759
 Internet:  [log in to unmask]
 
          Contents
     1.   Monthly Comments
     2.   The VIRTUAL MUSEUM by Jamie McKenzie
 
 ----- Monthly Comments ----
 Virtuality  has become a favorite buzz word of the latest  Washington power
elite.  Newt peppers sentences and paragraphs with the term.  We need to
exercise caution as we consider the potential of virtual museums, virtual
schools and virtual realities.  How are any of these substitutes for reality
different from  the real thing  or  the right stuff?   What do we lose when
we trade?  When is virtual reality counterfeit?  fraudulent? ersatz?
 plastic? pseudo?  adulterated?  phony? and false?
 
When Washington offers us virtual lunch, virtual equality, virtual
opportunity, virtual art and virtual compassion, what is the price?  How
about a virtual tax cut?  A virtual balanced budget?  How about virtual
laptops for the poor with virtual tax incentives applied  to virtual
incomes?  How about virtual education for those who live far from the
entrance ramp to the Internet?
 
Whenever we embrace virtual experiences, we must ask whether we have
protected the  virtue  (essential nature or quintessence) of that
experience.
 
Copyright Policy: Materials published in From Now On may be duplicated for
educational, non-profit school district use only.  In any other case,
contact the editor for permission.
 
VIRTUAL MUSEUMS:
Full of Sound and Fury
Signifying . . .
by Jamie McKenzie
 
 
Introduction
 
The World Wide Web makes possible a powerful new kind of student-centered,
constructivist learning by collecting at a single site a phenomenal array of
learning resources which can be explored with simple point-and-click skills.
 Some call these home pages  Virtual Libraries.   Because of their highly
visual character, I prefer the term  Virtual Museum.
 
1. The Virtual Museum Defined
 
A virtual museum is a collection of electronic artifacts and information
resources - virtually anything which can be digitized.  The collection may
include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings,
video segments, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical
databases and a host of other items which may be saved on the virtual
museum s file server.   It may also offer pointers to great resources around
the world relevant to the museum s main focus.
 
Most virtual museums on the Internet today are professionally constructed.
One can visit the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Louvre.
According to EDUPAGE (1/26/95) by September of 1995 four science museums
will offer virtual museums thanks to a project funded by Unisys and the
National Science - The Science Learning Network. The program will
incorporate "intelligent agents" that can learn a teacher's interest areas
and organize and suggest
avenues of study. (Investor's Business Daily 1/25/95 A8)
 
2. Students as Curators of Virtual Museums
 
Within the next year, we will begin to see students in many schools creating
their own virtual museums. instead of the fairly standard home pages which
are now typical of most school WWW sites.  In Bellingham, two schools are
already working on virtual museums..  One is called Ellis Island: a virtual
museum devoted to heritage and origin.  Visitors to the museum will be able
to explore their ancestry, regardless of which part of the globe they might
have started from.  Click on the world map where your own ancestors came
from and you will enter a wing of the museum devoted to your heritage.  The
other museum will focus upon Pacific Rim cultures.
 
Much of the material housed in a virtual museum may be generated and
produced by students who conduct research on the topic within their own
community and the global community, engaging in an electronic treasure hunt
to find great information and electronic artifacts.  Because students are
actually building meaning as they add to the museum collection, this is, in
many respects, a wonderful workshop for constructivist learning.
 
If you have access to the World Wide Web and would like to check out some
good sites related to this topic, try the following:
 
WHALES
http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/~kpj5e/Table.Contents.html
 
COLUMBIA's page on using the WEB for constructivist learning
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/LT/webcurr.html
 
COLUMBIA's page of readings on constructivist learning
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/LT/readings.html
 
WEBLOUVRE
http://sunsite.unc.edu/louvre/
 
THE RICE SCHOOL (TEXAS)
http://chico.rice.edu/armadillo/Rice/Rice_home.html
 
APRIL LLOYD's (NSF funded) TRIP TO ANTARCTICA
http://pen1.pen.k12.va.us:80/~alloyd/AAA.html
 
In addition to contributions by students, families and staff members of the
school, visitors to the museum may also submit entries.  Children from lands
of origin may send current day descriptions and digitized pictures of these
former homelands.  Children from Pacific Rim nations may send first person
accounts of life in their communities.  Students in the school housing the
virtual museum then serve as curators, reviewing outside submissions and
judging their suitability for inclusion.
 
3. Virtual Museums are Global
 
Besides the locally collected information resources, the virtual museum will
also point the visitor to the best related resources that can be found on
the Internet.  A visitor to the Pacific Rim museum, for example, may be able
to click on Korea on a large map of Asia.  This action will open a page
listing dozens of sites providing weather, tourist guides, economic data,
listservs  and political news.  Click on one of these and the visitor is on
a magic carpet ride to a different file server housed, perhaps, in Korea or
New York or Boise.
 
The beauty of a virtual museum is its capacity to connect the visitor with
valuable information across the entire globe.
 
Students and staff, once equipped with HTML programming skills (not much
harder than HyperCard), can simply cut and paste the addresses of great
sites from the WWW pages created by others.  These will then appear as
hypertext links on museum pages.
 
4. Virtual Museums are Dynamic, Multidisciplinary, and Multisensory
Unlike most school research projects, virtual museums provide persistent,
ongoing  change, activity, and progress  (American Heritage Dictionary
definition of  dynamic ). The collection process is never-ending.  Students
may continue their work over several years, and even after they leave their
elementary school to begin work at the virtual museum housed at the middle
school, they can return for "electronic" visits and note the expanding
collection.  Multi-age classes may focus upon the same challenge for several
years running without fear of repetition.  Students can actually see the
 fruits  of their inquiry.  They become  knowledge builders  rather than
mere consumers.
 
Museums are also fine vehicles for multidisciplinary studies, as the
collection may include everything from music and art to science and politics
and mathematics.  The driving research question for the Asian Rim museum
(Which culture would you pick if your family were to live abroad for a year
and why?) naturally steers students to look at a broad range of factors
which bridge the disciplines.
 
Virtual museums offer multi-sensory opportunities appealing to a variety of
learning styles and multiple intelligences.  One can see a Picasso.  One can
see and hear Tori Amos perform  Cornflake Girl.   While it is difficult to
touch or taste, the same would be true of a conventional museum.   Virtual
museums have great advantages over textbooks -  bringing vitality, color and
motion to student exploration.
 
Conclusion - Artificial Museums are
Full of Sound and Fury
 
We stand at a continental divide as one century and its learning
technologies give way to the next.  We can just begin to make out the
silhouette of a different kind of school - one where students gather
information, organize it, create meaning, reach insight, display their
findings and then invite an global audience to share the experience.
 
In the past, schooling has been too divorced from real life.  The study of
life through textbooks and teacher lectures was all too often a case of
artificial intelligence and virtual reality.  Few students mistook the
lessons as approaching the  real thing.
 
Virtual museums offer a different kind of learning - one which is fresh and
vibrant.  Schools can become . . .
 
 full of sound and fury, signifying . . .
 
Signifying!  Which means enlighten, open the mind, fill with information,
EDUCATE!