I sat in on the Art Education session Wed afternoon. Below are my thoughts:
Julie Springer of the National Gallery talked a bit about some work they’ve done with video iPods. It was presented as a podcast, though with the video involved it seemed more like a vodcast (semantics I guess). Julie showed a sample movie they had made with the default tools on a Mac, something anyone can do. The movie was a pseudo dialogue between a viewer and the subject in the painting. It was very well done. I would have loved to see an alternative version of this movie, giving a different voice to the conversation. I wonder if that wouldn’t help attract a different audience.
Abigail Frazen-Sheehan and Betsy James DiSalvo talked about their experiences in creating The Warhol, an online resource for teachers. They stressed the importance of user testing, and went through the various changes that were made along the way. Some of the changes were pretty small (simply adding another link option to the main nav), but made very large impacts. This was interesting to me because of our upcoming work with ArtsConnectEd.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stick around for the rest of this session.