Sunday, March 1, 2015

Week 6

An expected highlight of this week's class is that our two student project groups will be turning in their proposals for their final projects: a grant proposal.

General questions 
  • What is Web 2.0?
  • What is “Shared Authority”?  Where do you come down on question of the role of experts and non-experts in presenting the past?
  • Why would a member of the public participate in a shared authority digital project when they could just start their own blog or put up a website?
  • What is the role of museum staff in the world of public curation of content?
  • Why is it important to this book that the editors see a continuity between participation in the 20th century physical spaces and the 21st century virtual spaces?
  • Is “Humans of New York” an example of Letting Go?


Nina Simon, “Participatory Design and the Future of Museums”
  • What is a “folksonomy”?
  • What kind of participatory techniques have you found engaging on the web?
  • Do you agree that feedback has to get used?
  • What is the relationship between participatory feedback and the “trending” feature of sites like Facebook and Twitter?
  • Do you want to go to museums where visitors create the content? (I did at this one: http://cmany.org/)
  • What is the difference between the Unsuggester and spam?


Steve Zeitlin, “Where Are the Best Stories? Where Is My Story?”
  • What is the distinction between contributed stories and curated stories?
  • Is Facebook a museum?
  • If they are curating the content of cityofmemory.org, in what senses are they “letting go”?


Matthew Fisher and Bill Adair, “Online Dialogue and Cultural Practice: A Conversation”
  • What are the underlying reasons for Shared Authority?
  • Digital engagement tools: Favoriting, Tagging, Commenting, Blogging
  • Is history just “a collection of truths”? What is the role of analysis in public engagement?


Matthew MacArthur, “Get Real! The Role of Objects in the Digital Age”
  • I wonder what the role of 3-D printing might be in the curation of digital objects.
  • Do you think that the physical experience or the digital experience of museums is more important?


Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, chapter 5
  • Should historians be responsible for getting digital content online?
  • What do you think of representing history with “thought experiments”? What is the goal of teaching history?
  • What is “backwards design”?
  • What do you think of Kelly’s Lying About the Past experimental course?
  • Is it OK to ask students to put false information into Wikipedia? Into the Internet?
  • Why does Kelly narrate the hoax in the present tense as if he was going to teach the course again?
  • Could Kelly have generated similar enthusiasm among his students if he had found a well-documented but obscure historical figure for them to research and document? That is, what is the role of “hoaxing” in this class?
  • What was the educational value in Kelly’s experiment?
  • What is the point of teaching students to write papers?


Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, “Conclusion

  • Do you agree with Kelly’s underlying belief that young people (=students) prefer to represent their learning about history in a variety of non-written formats?

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