Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.17.10 | Art on your iPhone; the eBook Summit; what the public thinks of the Smithsonian Commons prototype; a decrease in teen blogging; virtual fossil digs; feedback on iCivics; and holiday gifts kids can program themselves.

Apps for Art Lovers: Many of the world’s top art museums are introducing new smartphone apps to enrich the museum going experience. The New York Times reports on the efforts of leading cultural institutions who are developing mobile apps and websites to give visitors access to new content – podcasts, oral histories, images and video, much of which, they hope, will be user generated.

The applications allow museum visitors to interact with and adapt a museum’s collection in new ways both during and after the museum visit. An app developed for The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, lets users rearrange 38 elements of a 17th-century Dutch still life.

Hein Wils, a project manager for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam told the Times he wants visitors to “use their phones as lenses, allowing them to see otherwise invisible images — like sleek computer-generated sculptures or floating interviews with artists — on the screens as they walk around the Stedelijk and point their phones’ cameras at objects.”

For a related piece read Read Mac Montandon’s “Art Mobs: Strolling MoMA with Student Curators on Your iPod” at Spotlight.

Plus, Geo-Mapped Apps That Bring Books to Life: Books are getting on the app bandwagon as well, with the potential to become interactive museums at your fingertips.  We’re just back from the eBook Summit in New York sponsored by Media Bistro and all the talk was of the potential of apps to make the story come alive in new and interesting ways, and to connect the reader and author in a dynamic conversation. The future “book tour” may no longer be an author-centric tour but a self-led app tour of all the sites the main character visits in a city or town instead. Or Moby Dick might come replete with information on the whaling industry in New England at the time, maps of the seas where Ahab sailed, or the smell of whale blubber being boiled down to oil. As Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Program or Be Programmed” said, the day of the small, DYI indie publisher is before us: “We’re like the rats after the apocalypse.  We’re doing whatever works for survival.”

A new platform to be unveiled soon by Broadcastr, a division of the amazing Electric Literature, is showing us how the ancient history of storytelling might be reimagined for the 21st century. Broadcastr is a map-based platform that allows anyone anywhere in the world to contribute a story—whether it be how they fell in love or the joy of raking leaves. The stories are then geo-mapped to the location of the storyteller and indexed by key words. People can listen to them, share them, email them, group them into play lists on any platform: web app, iPhone, iPad, Android.  Citizen journalists, for example, could record a story from the location of a major event and listeners could hear up-to-the minute broadcasts from the ground.  Or as you walk to brunch to meet your boyfriend on a Sunday morning, you filter for love stories, and hear the stories that are pinned virtually to the block you’re walking. The possibilities are limitless. The project is in beta with a soft launch happening next week in New York.

Shaping Your Future Museum Experience: Folks over at the Smithsonian are also thinking about the future of your museum-going experience, and it’s digital.  The Smithsonian has been collecting public comment on prototypes for their new digital space, Smithsonian Commons, currently under development as part of the museum’s new media strategy.

They’ve received over 1200 comments and have just posted the 100 favorites on their wikispace.  Organized by subject and author type, the comments give a great sense of the breadth and scope of the project. There’s constructive critique on everything from the propriety of the museum’s data to the way information is presented. But there’s also much praise from educators who are thrilled about the prospect of this new vast resource, like this one from a “researcher/scientist/scholar”:

I believe this exemplifies 21st century learning at its best.  The potential is limitless for educators who desire to create authentic, interactive learning environments that integrate technology.

Are Blogs For Old People? The Pew Internet & American Life Project yesterday released a new report from their Generations Online project showing that blogging by teenagers has fallen by half since 2006.  According to the report, “Only 14% of teens ages 12-17 worked on their own blog as of 2009, a drastic decrease since 2006, when twice as many (28%) said they had done so.” Authors speculate this may be due to the growing popularity of social networking tools. Though the young adult group’s blogging habits also slowed, don’t give up on the medium yet. Older generations are still blogging, and the rate among all adults who blogged rose slightly overall.

Teens Dig Virtual Paleontology: Teens in Chicago and New York have been participating in a unique afterschool science camp in partnership with Chicago’s Field Museum and the New York City nonprofit, Global Kids. During iDig Brazil, students learned about the country’s paleontology, biology, climate change and even dance through virtual and real world activities that included fossil digs in the virtual world of Teen Second Life and real world meetings with scientists.

The program is part of a series of virtual fossil digs in Global Kids’ iDig Science program that started in 2008. (For more watch Spotlight’s “Dig It: Teens Go on a Virtual Fossil Dig With Museum Scientists in Africa”.)

Final presentations took place over Skype this week. We enjoyed James Pannell’s presentation below. He gives his own theory about the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction that took place about 250 million years ago. He definitely gets an A for special volcano effects. You can watch more student extinction theories here.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Wants to Hear From You: The CUNY Games Network is calling all teachers, students and gamers to play the games available on iCivics and tell them what you think.  The brainchild of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, iCivics is a web-based education project designed to inspire students to be more active citizens through online game play. (Learn more about iCivics in this Spotlight video).  O’Connor began the project over concerns about improving civics education and improving materials available to teachers.

Games teach about the three branches of government and the Constitution.  The project’s 12th game release “Immigration Nation” just came out and teaches about the path to citizenship. You can play all the games at the iCivics website. Submit your comments to the CUNY Games Network here.

Electronic Gifts with Limits: A national survey by PBS Kids found that 49% of parents with kids age 12 and under plan to give their kids electronic gifts this season such as cell phones, computers, tablets and mp3 players. “Once these gifts are unwrapped, most parents say they plan to have rules and restrictions to help children stay safe online,” according to a press release. The survey found that the “majority of parents, 86 percent, agree that teaching kids about internet safety starts at home. Seventy-three percent will put restrictions on the sites their kids can visit, while 68 percent will limit the time their kids are allowed to use their new tech toys.”

Give the Gift of a Homemade App:  Google’s App Inventor, which launched in July as a tool for creating apps on the android phone, is now available to anyone with a Google account. The tool has received accolades for its potential in the classroom and as a stepping stone to help students jump from digital media consumers to creators. And Readwriteweb listed it in their post on “4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code.” Now you don’t need to have an Android phone to play around.  As Karen Parker writes on Google’s research blog: “Maybe this holiday season you can make a new kind of homemade gift—an app perfectly designed for the recipient’s needs!”