Here in Bellingham, the Whatcom Museum of History and Art is partnering
with the public schools to develop virtual museums which engage students
as curators.

Visit our site at http://www.bham.wednet/edu

If you would like the full text to the article below, please send me an
e-mail request or download it from http://www.bham.wednet.edu/muse.htm

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.
(CONTINUED)

Jamieson McKenzie, Ed.D.
Director of Libraries, Media and Technology
Bellingham Public Schools
1306 Dupont
Bellingham, WA 98225
[log in to unmask]
(206) 676-6525

Bellingham is installing a 1500 station
WAN to connect 10,000 students in 18
schools with each other and the Net.
Located near the Canadian border, the
beautiful San Juan islands and majestic,
snow-capped Mt. Baker, Bellingham sits
on a beautiful bay and offers sublime
sunsets.

"The soul is the source of
its own unfolding."

Heraclitus