Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

The class Lab Museum Design and Interpretation proved to be a valuable learning experience for me. From the class I gained a little more confidence with dealing with technology. When a class is so heavily focused on technology, then I think students tend to be isolationists. They do their own work on their computer and submit it online. If one isn’t really technologically proficient or don’t like computers, they will do the minimum work. The blog idea can be useful, and comments can be good but I feel like people don’t really comment and a conversation isn’t started. In order to create an online exhibit, there needs to be more of an emphasis on blogging and comments to start and have a discussion online. That is where this class needed improvements, more communication between groups. Kati also noticed that and mentioned it in her reflection.

On the positive side, technology and the internet can have some great benefits to the museum field. A museum’s website should be informative and fun and get the viewer excited about the subject. An online exhibit forced me to think more in a virtual world, instead of real.

The online exhibit about Germanna is a basic and informational website. I really like the homepage, it is simple, direct, and brings people into the site. The site itself is very intellectual which is understandable coming from a group of University students. First criticism about it, some of the language is unclear and confusing. Then the images to me don’t correlate well with the text. I think they were picked just as an after thought. This is not a casual website for a casual web browser. People really have to sit down and study this website to really explore and understand what we wrote.

All three sections did well. The Evolution explains a basic history of the land at Germanna. There were two groups of German immigrants that lived and worked in this area called Germanna. The Myth gives a good explanation about the Knights, the expedition to Shenandoah, and the Enchanted Castle. Archaeology writes about the excavations done at Germanna. So yes, the website does achieve its mission. It does communicate information about Germanna.

At the beginning I became the Project Manager for the Myth group. Back in February I did venture downtown to the library and did research about Alexander Spotswood. As a result, I wrote the section titled “Maker of Myth.” From reading Kati’s and Nathan’s essays I lost that title. When the class was working on the website I became confused and did not know what quite to do, so Kati became our fearless leader. One of the reasons that I was perplexed was because the technology was new to me. I never created a website before.

 Thank you for a good semester!Happy Blogging!