There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read moreTag: virtual exhibit
This weekend, I was a judge at a local chapter of National History Day (NHD). I judged web sites. Amazingly, these sites were much better than those of many small history museums. The students’ sites used a mixture of text, images, video and audio clips in a thoughtful way. This year’s theme was “Debate and Diplomacy.”
I can’t show you the sites I reviewed, but here are 3 winning examples from 2010: Electrifying America; Polio Pioneer; and Out of the Box, Into the Oven.
Like museums in the physical world, WebExhibits presents information that is, for the most part, timeless. Yet WebExhibits also demonstrates a radical departure from physical museums, in terms of 24/7 accessibility, adaptation to support multiple learning styles, and cost-effectiveness. As of October 2010, 75% of U.S. households have high-speed Internet access, and virtually all students have Internet access at schools or libraries.
Virtual exhibits are cost effective. It costs only a few pennies to serve a WebExhibits visitor, in contrast with a typical U.S. museum’s cost of $23 per visitor.
Prado, Madrid In 2003, Museo del Prado had a major exhibit on Titian, the leader of the 16th century Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painters. Organized in collaboration with the National Gallery in London, this ambitious project brought together 65 paintings from various European and American museums that were commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara.