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 20^th century physical spaces and the 21^st 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?