This page is part of the documentation on the MOOseum Tools Project, a collaboration between Kalí Tal and ConnectionsMOO. The purpose of this project is to provide a suite of tools based on a museum metaphor to humanities scholars who are interested in integrating new media technology into their courses. The tools, currently under development, will be distributed freely as a suite, and will run on LambdaCore, JHCore and enCOre MOOs. If you are interested in beta testing these tools, contact Kalí Tal.
Draft 8/10/99
Kalí Tal
We're employing a familiar museum metaphor to entice humanities professors into using the MOO for teaching and resource development.
Assigning students to create an on-line museum exhibition is an excellent way of ensuring that they master the historical, literary and/or cultural subjects they're studying well enough to teach those subjects to others. Exhibitions can be completed within the time frame of a single course, or they can span many courses and become a lasting internet resource. It is easy to imagine exhibitions designed by university students evolving into curriculum material for high schoolers.
The beauty of the MOOseum Tools Project is that it simultaneously encourages experimentation and also allows for the construction of permanent resources.
To attract humanities scholars we will provide them with an intuitive interface and a complete set of tools. No programming skills should be necessary. The toolbox should be complete and should allow them to reasonably assign their students to create a complete and fully operational exhibition. The MOO offers an excellent environment for developing such a toolset. We have created a set of generic objects which can be intuitively grasped and put to use by students and teachers, as well as provided extensive online help files.
Humanities scholars are strongly pressured to adopt technological tools in their teaching. However, most of these tools aren’t designed with humanities scholars in mind and don’t take advantage of the technology to help us do our jobs better. We need tools that enable us to achieve goals we couldn’t reach without the assistance of technology. Exhibition creation utilizes many of the skills humanities professors require their students to master: research, textual and critical analysis, and the construction of a coherent argument. It also is well-suited to interdisciplinary work—exhibition design can integrate the methods and materials of any number of disciplines ranging from material culture to history to theology to fine arts, and everything in between. And exhibition creation requires collaboration, a skill which will serve students well in their professional lives no matter what career path they choose. Exhibition design is also well suited to collaborations between professors and classes since the MOO is accessible 24 hours a day and thus eliminates the problem of scheduling conflicts.
The MOOseum Toolset is ready for beta testing, and will be used in several courses at University of Arizona this semester, Fall 1999:
At the moment the project has no funding and all work is being done on a volunteer basis.
Tools will be freely available to individuals and institutions. They will be distributed as a package in formats compatible with most popular MOO software. Commercial repackaging of the tools is strictly forbidden.
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