Teaching and Learning in Museums
Short List of Museums

Making Museums Come Alive

     Our first project should be fun. It's a field trip to a museum. There are virtual museums and this is an online class so it's natural to consider a virtual tour. However, for this assignment, get out and stretch your legs and actually go into a museum building. There are several around the Monmouth/Salem area and many more around Corvallis, Portland and Eugene and elsewhere. It doesn't need to be a big museum. Each museum, even small ones, have their purpose.

     The idea is to make the items in the museum come alive. To recognize that every item has a story, how it was created, who used it, and how it was used. In each story there is a person who had a life like each of us with joys and pains, who was hunger and slept. Bring to life that person or persons with feelings and relate it to your audience whether children or teens or adults.

     We will learn throughout this course how to refine our skills but for now we will some of the skills that come naturally. Choose your theme; what is it that you want to teach or demonstrate? To whom are you going to teach this idea? Consider their skills, their education, their background, their limitations. Title your lesson, this is great if you're going to actually teach this lesson and you wish to promote it.

     What points do you want to make? What do you want them to know when you are finished? How do we want them to be different when you're finished? Generally (our goal) and specifically (our objectives). Then what are we actually going to do to accomplish these objectives? What will we do so that the audience will change their behavior or increase their knowledge.

     Since this is an online class you will not have the opportunity to present this lesson to your classmates in a classroom. Therefore, we will consider an electronic venue. For this presentation you will use Powerpoint and you will set the Powerpoint to run automatically. Several links below will give you an opportunity to observe how different size presentations result in different size documents.

The Powerpoint with manually advancing slide and no voice
The Powerpoint with automatically advancing slides and a 2 minute narrative
The Powerpoint as a movie (2 minutes, 41M)
The Powerpoint as a website (manual advancement)

     Now, how to get this Powerpoint assignment to the instructor

- Upload it in Moodle. There is a 500M limitation and that should not be a problem.
- Upload it into the p-drive (called public_html on a Mac) using the Remote Desktop Connection (this requires that you create the Powerpoint on the Remote Desktop Connection)
- Upload it into the p-drive or public_html by coming to the WOU campus (this means you create the powerpoint on campus or you bring the powerpoint to campus on a thumbdrive or CD)
- Burn the presentation onto a CD and give it to the instructor (this means you need to travel to campus or mail it).
- Send it as an attachment to an email to the instructor: saxowsd@wou.edu (the limitations here again relate to the size and some email programs will not send large attachments).
- An ultimate option: "ultimate" because we discovered it to be better than anything already listed, and because it's using current technology. See what you can find or have already experienced. Try YouTube or similar website like YouTube which you might find at go2web20.net.

     Let's set the deadline for this assignment to be due to the instructor by noon April 11.