Scenario 2: An Art Museum Tour

In the case of the high school teacher who wants to take his students on a virtual tour of 2 New York art museums, the distance technologies that would work the best would be a combination of a videoconferencing (Synchronous) system for the interaction with the museum curator and a course management system (Asynchronous) such as a Web 2.0 for attaching the virtual tour and creating a blog to discuss the works of art. The Web 2.0 could be any of the CMS’ we discussed this week such as Edu 2.0, Blackboard, School Rack, etc. The teacher would be able to use this to set up the assignments of critiquing the artwork and the threaded discussions or blogs for the groups to collaborate. "The Internet promotes active learning and facilitates student's intellectual involvement with the course content" (Simonson, 2009). The videoconferencing session would take place in a group session with the students all interacting with the curator. Ideally, they would have taken the virtual tour first and could then ask the curator questions based on their observations. The curator might also walk through the museum with a video camera discussing the works and answering questions as he goes along. This week's video titled "The Technology of Distance Eduation" discusses some of the methods needed for conducting courses. "Research shows that use of visual and verbal modes of learning together significantly increases learning." If students are given the visual opportunity to see the parts of the museum and the verbal presentation by the curator, then learning will increase. Ideally, the students would each have a laptop computer and could access the tour while the videoconferencing session was being broadcast on a screen at the front of the class.

There are a multitude of possibilities for making this assignment work, and the following are some of the technologies that I discovered for creating the virtual tour and some examples of virtual tours of other museums.

For fun, I spent some time on The Louvre’s website. http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=en
Since it might be a while before I am able to travel to France and take the tour myself, this was a fun way to see what the museum has to offer. The 360-degree tours of the different galleries were wonderful, and each one was described in detail as to what it contained and its historical relevance. I was also able to look at several works of art close up in order to examine them in detail. This would be very helpful in this scenario for the teacher to have his students examine the works up close.

I found a sample virtual tour that a company called Virtual Tours uses to show the services they provide. They create virtual museum tours for museums and other events for a small, unlisted price.

Sample Virtual Tour
http://www.virtualgallerytours.com/Sample-Gallery/index.html

In this tour, I was able to view the gallery from a 360-degree rotation. When I wanted to look at a picture up close, I was able to click on it and pull it off the wall. It was presented in front of me with the name of the painting and the artist. This would have allowed me, had I been assigned to critique a painting, the opportunity to view it up close and evaluate its different features.

They don’t tell us what software they use, but in my research, I believe it might be Tourweaver 6.0. http://tourweaver.en.softonic.com/

This Tourweaver software allows the user to create virtual tours which include, according to the website, “Spherical panoramas, cylindrical panoramas, still images, sound, URL, hotspots, interactive map/floor plan, slideshows, and text.” The virtual tour could then be placed in a flash box somewhere on the web page and viewed in Quick Time, or a similar program.

The other site I found allows customers to subscribe to a virtual tour engine ranging from $15/month to $200/month. It is user friendly and merely requires the user to paste the URL of the finished tour onto his/her website. Instead of hiring a company to create this tour, I could create it myself. It is called Virtual Tours. http://www.virtualtourengine.com/default.aspx
Both these products are easy to use and would work well with any of the CMS’ that we have reviewed in this course. By merely pasting the URL onto Edu 2.0, Blackboard, School Rack, etc., the instructor would have a virtual museum tour available for his students whenever they wanted to view it.

There are a great many advantages to using virtual learning in the classroom. The Internet and online courses open up educational opportunities in a way that can not be addressed in a four-walled, self-contained classroom. "Virtual worlds appear to have exciting potential for placing students in real-life applications of course content, for example, in problem-solving situations, and especially experiences in other places and times that would otherwise be inaccessible, such as visiting Mars, traveling through the human body's circulation system, or witnessing rituals at Stonehenge" (Simonson, 2009). If we embrace this technology and incorporate it into our classrooms, then the possibilities for student growth are endless.

Louvre http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=en

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

"The technology of distance education." (ND): Laureate Online Education.

Tourweaver 6.0. http://tourweaver.en.softonic.com/

Virtual Tours. http://www.virtualtourengine.com/default.aspx