Interactive Tours – Week 3 Application
Example: A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?
In this scenario, there are many options for the high school teacher. In the multimedia presentation, "The Technology of Distance Education" (2010), it recommends using media sharing sites. These are ‘Web sites that facilitate the sharing of content and artifacts such as text, pictures, videos, presentations and audio files.” (2010) There are several of these sites such as Flickr and YouTube, but there is also one called Microsoft Photosynth. This allows the user to upload a series of images in a place like a museum and allow the viewer to scan the entire area and focus in on any particular spot, or in this case, artwork. Click on this link to see an example of how one museum in Orange County, California used it: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=884a1845-e29e-4ef5-a4d0-13bdb9d97686. This type of media website would solve the issue of letting the students see all the artwork in New York.
The second part of this scenario needs an online place to critique two specific art pieces and interact with the curator. The aforementioned multimedia presentation (2010) and the book Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Learning, state that through the use of Blogging, this format could be used for “student reflections about course content or reporting activities in a student teaching experience.” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009, p.245) With a blog, the curator could post images of the two pieces of art, write their own thoughts or ask questions about the artwork and then the students could respond to the curator and/or the other students’ critiques. The following link from the Laguna Art Museum in California is an example of this format in use: http://lagunaartmuseum.org/blogs.
In addition to this format posting the specific artwork on a social network could be powerful as well. Using “social networking sites promote the development of online communities through posting of personal information, journals, photos…” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009, p.246) The most popular social network is Facebook, but there are others such as Hitwise and MySpace. The curator could set up a specific account just for the purpose of critiquing these two art pieces and communicate with the students about their critiques.
References
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009).
Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance
education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
Multimedia Program: "The Technology of Distance Education"
This interactive multimedia introduces the advantages and disadvantages of using the technological innovations that have played a significant role in the evolution of distance learning including podcasts, discussion technologies, blogs, concept maps, and media sharing sites. Walden University (2010)
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