Informal education, museums, and the Peace Corps
“Peace Corps and the Alamo. I never thought I’d hear that combination.” That was the reaction of a professor several years ago when I mentioned where I had worked. In March, when I attended the Symposium on Informal Learning, sponsored by the American Association of Museums and The George Washington University Museum Education Program, I [...]
Interactivity: Best Friend and Worst Foe
As the Clio Wired sequence draws to a close (except for those of us doing a minor field in digital history), and we move toward the sequence’s end product–a full digital history project–this week’s reading and web visit considered interactivity. Ah yes, interactivity. The best friend and worst foe of exhibition developers, informal educators, and [...]
Making information accessible
As we’ve discussed throughout the semester, design is not just about making things pretty, but also functional–to go back to my former classmate’s telling, the crossroads of art and engineering. This week’s web visits focused more on the functionality part, specifically making websites accessible to people with disabilities, and the reading (Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations) [...]
Tucson: Overreaction as protest?
The last few days, my Twitter stream has lit up with justified outrage about the banning of ethnic studies–and related books–in Arizona’s classrooms. What has especially made news is the Tucson Unified School District’s seizure of the banned books. Opponents of ethnic studies in Arizona’s schools claim that such curricula “divide [students] by race and [...]