And another semester begins

My last semester (hopefully, if I've got it all figured out correctly) began this week. I'm one class and an independent study away from completing grad school. It's going to be an amazing semester as I have Mashup Culture with Josephine Dorado and am doing an independent study project of creating a wiki about museum use of social media with Shannon Mattern as my advisor.

To go out with a bang, I'm planning on updating this blog more often with updates about the progress of my wiki. Yesterday I came up with a work plan based around the structure I plan to have in the wiki. After reviewing the plan, Shannon reminded me that I need to focus on research prior to production of the wiki. Taking a bit to look at the overall meaning and then breaking it down to publish it should make for a more meaningful product.

So, stay tuned for the final chapter in this grad school adventure of mine.

The Walker Art Center, PBS and Social Media

For a paper in my Museums and Media class I explored the uses of social media and iTunes by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. While the use of social media by businesses is a hot topic, the use of social media by non-profits is not as big of a topic of conversation in media. I was really impressed with all of the ways that the Walker has reached out to use social media and iTunes. It's great to see all of these resources that can be considered places for solely for socializing or having fun used in an educational and cultural capacity.

Museums in Suburbia

This semester in my Museums As Media class we've talked a lot about interactive media in museums and on their websites. Many of my classmates and I live in urban areas. This weekend I am visiting my parents in the sprawling suburbia of southern New Jersey. It gives me a different perspective on the features of museum websites.

It's the Spring of Museums!

The Spring semester has started and so far I love both of my classes - Museums as Media and Social Media: Content, Community, and Culture.

In my Museums as Media class someone mentioned an exhibit that was as the Museum of the American Indian. There's a blog post on the Smithsonian website that talks about the exhibit and interviews a Native American skateboarder and filmmaker. This video was contained in the blog:

4wheelwarpony from Dustinn Craig on Vimeo.

The first project in my Museums class is to write a paper on a visit to a museum, and so I visited the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday. The exhibits were all based on a portraiture theme. The works were not in the form of traditional portraits and caused me to consider the many ways that we as humans can be represented in art.